Market Segmentation and Trend Tracking

Which segment of the complex consumer market are you reaching? How can you expand your market? Mind/Share can provide demographic breakdowns on just who your consumer is. Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, we’ll tell you how your current customers perceive your products and how you can expand your reach.

What are consumers thinking? How do they fill their days? Before you can market to consumers you need to understand them. Our research and analysis will answer your questions to provide you with everything from the big picture to a small snapshot of what goes on in your consumers' worlds.

We can monitor emerging tastes and desires of key customer segments in order to forecast new products or styles.  Let your managers "see" what consumers in their target market are choosing from week to week without leaving their desks.

Style Testing

Collect valuable data on consumers' changing preferences early in the design cycle. Get quick and early feedback on new design options prior to shipping samples or rolling out new products. Test reactions to sketches, prototypes, or finished products - from the very people who are in your target market.

Marketing Communications

Pretest advertising and promotion executions quickly and easily.  Identify consumers' assumptions and preferences regarding brand personality and lifestyle linkages. Test the potential of collaborative advertising ventures, cross-promotions, and product placements.  Get quick feedback on potential models, celebrity endorsers, logos, and package designs.

Store and Mall Design

Understand in-store decision making, store image, design atmospherics and competitive market position.  Get shoppers' reactions to visual merchandising strategies, layouts and store designs.

Litigation Support

Expert testimony regarding consumers' reactions to visual images is key to numerous cases. For example, trademark infringement often involves the court's assessment of likelihood of confusion such as Two Pesos and Polaroid Corp. v. Polarad Electronics, 287 F.2d 492 (2d Cir. 1961) (cert denied 368 U.S. 820 (1961) or secondary meaning such as Mishawaka Rubber & Woolen Mfg. Co. v. S.S. Krege Co., 316 U.S. 203 (1942). In other litigation contexts it is often extremely effective to present consumer data obtained from mail surveys, phone polls or mall intercepts.

We offer an alternative to these cumbersome and often expensive methods. Mind/Share specializes in online consumer research studies that employ rich visuals. Our methodologies are particularly well-suited to support litigation involving customers' or employees' reactions to visual stimuli such as trademarks, trade dress, store displays, etc. We can provide supporting evidence for assertions regarding the impact of these cues (e.g., potential confusion between two competing trademarks among consumers) using nationally or locally representative samples, depending on your needs.

For example: We were retained by a prominent national law firm to conduct an online consumer survey on behalf of a plaintiff (a very well-known fashion designer) who was suing a large manufacturer for mismanagement of the designer's license. Part of the litigation focused upon the presentation of the designer's products in retail outlets and the potential damage to the designer as a result of these displays. In this context, a traditional phone survey simply would not suffice to adequately capture the effect on consumers' attitudes toward the carefully cultivated brand image. Instead, our respondents reacted to a series of photographs presented online (and accessed in the privacy of their own homes). In a carefully controlled experiment, we were able to present compelling scientific evidence to support plaintiff's claims. The study was administered to a pre-recruited representative national sample of consumers who took the survey while logged on at home. Data were analyzed and a complete report was supplied to the attorneys in 10 days.

Because we conduct our research online we can field a study and provide a report of the study's results in a much shorter period of time than traditional approaches such as mail surveys. Unlike telephone surveys, these studies can collect detailed individual responses to visual stimuli. Unlike mall intercepts, we can deliver a large, statistically representative sample. Because the need for interviewing facilities and other research components are eliminated, costs typically are significantly lower compared to other research methodologies.

Six Sigma and New Product Development Processes

To date no systematic framework exists to integrate empirical feedback from customers into Six Sigma new product development and product improvement processes.  In cooperation with DuPont, Mind/Share has developed a sequence of data collection steps that allow a design team to identify and prioritize unmet needs and orient product development/improvement.

Brand Vision

Products are purchased because of what they mean, not because of what they do. A fundamental challenge for marketers is to develop and communicate a consistent, desirable image to a specified target market using multiple executions and a variety of media formats. Currently the tools used to assess brand meaning are surprisingly rudimentary; at best a set of prototype concepts may be presented in a series of focus groups. This procedure is costly and unreliable. Brand Vision is a new approach to concept development that:

1. Provides rapid-response feedback from actual consumers early in the branding process.
2. Leverages the highly visual nature of this process (e.g., involving logos, package designs, storyboards)
3. develops a lexicon of imagery that can be applied efficiently and economically across product categories and brands.

Brand Vision is an online, visually oriented research tool that defines and tracks brand meaning. The methodology incorporates both qualitative and quantitative approaches to define a brand's meaning in the minds of current and prospective customers. These meanings can be compared to those perceived by brand managers, merchandisers and other value-chain participants.

By providing in-depth understanding of the brand concept as it currently exists in the minds of consumers and by comparing how these perceptions do or do not accord with desired brand positioning, we are able to pinpoint the gaps between the desired position and customers' perceptions. This provides a powerful springboard for developing the creative platform, refining brand positioning strategies and evaluating the efficacy of marketing initiatives. Once the brand concept is well understood and elements and the marketing approach are in development, Brand Vision can be used to test specific creative options.

One focus of this research tool is the identification of underlying brand or product concepts that can be translated into a set of consistent visual executions. This holistic perspective enables the creation of coherent marketing campaigns that feature consistent concept meanings across individual elements of the marketing effort. The emphasis on visual associations yields a powerful tracking system to assist in developing a lexicon of imagery that can be used for multiple products and brands in multiple markets. A visual versus verbal system also ameliorates the translation problems typically encountered in cross-cultural marketing research.