We regularly speak at industry and trade events on customer experience, market research and marketing topics. If you plan on attending an upcoming event, please let us know: we’d like to meet you! If you missed us, please fill out the form in Contact Us and we will be happy to follow-up with you.
To receive the latest CMI news by email, connect.
Upcoming Events
Marketing Through Intermediaries: Simulated Conversations Put You In the Room
Jean Fasching, Vice President Business Development, CMI
NewMR’s “Putting the Qual in Qualitative”, Online Conference, March 28
In industries that rely heavily on intermediaries to convey finely tuned product messages (e.g. insurance, financial services, and pharmaceuticals), the distance between the brand team and the actual consumer can seem like a million miles. How do you really know whether and how your intermediaries are communicating your most important messages, benefits, and features?
Jean will share tips for designing simulated conversations that become the foundation for:
- Insightful talking points that facilitate effective conversations and overcome challenges for intermediaries
- Valuable educational tools that inform consumers before, during and after intermediary conversations
- Detailed recommendations that target particular segments of intermediaries and consumers more effectively
Using Information-seeking Behavior to Drive Segment-specific Communication Strategies
Mike Mabey, Vice President Client Services, CMI
Jarod Ricci, Senior Manager, Market Analytics, Pfizer Specialty
PMRG 2012 Annual National Conference, Orlando, FL, March 25-27
Our research shows that information-seeking behavior is a significant predictor of future action, brand choice, early adoption, and decision-making. Our Pfizer team will discuss identifiable segments of information-seeking behavior, such as segments with high digital and social media usage, segments that consistently use multiple sources, and segments that never look for information outside of their doctor’s office. And they will talk about how understanding and leveraging these differences in information-seeking behavior should be an important part of your brand strategy and communications plan.
Attendees will walk away from this session with:
- A new way to leverage information-seeking behavior to drive your brand communication strategy
- Examples of three segments of information-seeking behavior
- Best practices for developing information-seeking segment-specific communication strategies
Recent Events
Understanding Satisfaction with the Donor Experience
Alisa Hamilton, Research Manager, CMI
Angie C. Moore, SVP – CRM Officer, Nonprofit Group, Merkle, Inc.
2012 Washington Nonprofit Conference, Washington DC, March 1-2
Constituent satisfaction is the new must have to drive greater financial impact for non-profit organizations. Alisa and Angie will share new results from a groundbreaking study that blends direct constituent research on satisfaction with the giving experience of five health charities with the actions and engagement of those constituents. They will address the primary drivers of positive and negative experiences, and how improvement in these areas equates to increased retention, donations and overall constituent value. Also, attendees will learn how this information can be used to prioritize marketing investments for the greatest gains with specific targeted donor segments.
Will They Stay or Will They Go? — Understanding Donors and Their Decisions
Alisa Hamilton, Research Manager, CMI
Suzanne Ray, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
2012 Washington Nonprofit Conference, Washington DC, March 1-2
Customer segmentation can be incredibly powerful, helping to prioritize resources and improve campaign effectiveness. Unfortunately, companies frequently have a difficult time implementing and leveraging segmentations across the organization. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and many other organizations have found that segmenting donors into groups saves costs and dramatically improves returns. In fact, using effective segmentation strategies to understand donors and their decisions is key to growing and retaining a donor base without breaking the bank. In this presentation, Alisa and Suzanne will cover:
- Benefits to segmentation
- Segmentation strategies to address specific organizational goals
- Addressing high-end donors through attitudinal and preference segmentation
- Building a wide renewal base through behavioral segmentation
- Motivating online givers through self segmentation
- Learn about segmentation success at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Five Ways to Make Brand Tracking Research More Valuable
Bill Salokar, Vice President Business Development, CMI
Kimberly Cason, Research Analyst, American Cancer Society
IIR The Market Research Event, Orlando, FL – November 7-9
With the pressures of budget cuts, information overload, and static findings, you may be taking a hard look at your brand and ad tracking programs. Does their value justify the cost? The American Cancer Society recently tackled the value challenge when they revamped their program to evaluate their national “birthdays” advertising campaign (www.morebirthdays.com). In this presentation, we shared five key ways we helped make their program more valuable:
- Focus on What Matters – Use effective analytics to go beyond reporting numbers to identifying real priorities
- Expand Your Horizon– Incorporate supplemental social media and key organizational metrics
- Build Relevance – Create engagement by making it easier to access data and answer questions
- Plan for Flexibility – Develop an architecture that accommodates urgent /specialized organizational information needs
- Plan for Special Support – Budget for analytical or other support to dive deeper on timely issues
Market Research in the Next Decade: How to Win in the Future
Chet Zalesky, CMI President and Ian Lewis, Partner, Cambiar Consulting
2011-10-25 CMI-Cambiar-Webinar-Slides- Webinar event held October 25, 2011
See Your Customers through an Ethnographic “Lens of Life”
Laura Winn Johnson, Qualitative Research Manager and Ethnographer
ABA Bank Marketer National Conference, Baltimore, MD – October 18-20, 2011
In today’s volatile and competitive financial marketplace, issues of customer acquisition and retention have never been more critical for financial marketing professionals. At the same time, customers’ attitudes about financial institutions, saving, investing and overall financial wellbeing are in a state of flux. It is essential to move beyond the basics toward an understanding of the larger context of the category, and the role that brand and product play in each customer’s life. A successful and well-designed ethnographic research program provides a comprehensive view of individuals’ lifestyles, behaviors and attitudes. Ethnography can be an incredibly valuable tool to understand how customers make decisions about where and how to invest their money, particularly in financial services, where decisions are often quite complicated – often impacted by multiple influencers and considerations over a long period of time.
A 360° Brand View: Identifying New Opportunities for Your Business
Laura Winn, Qualitative Research Manager, CMI
NewMR Ethnography Virtual Event online – May 25, 2011
The presentation highlights the ways brand teams can understand the myriad ways that consumers relate to and experience their brand, product or service. Laura explains how an authentic observational framework may be used to tackle complex strategic marketing issues. This framework goes beyond traditional research approaches, leveraging the principles of Cultural Anthropology and creative combination of research methods to understand the brand category in new ways within the full context of consumers’ lives.
Click here for a recording of Laura’s presentation: http://newmr.org/page/6298711:Page:9315
Click here for more information about the conference: http://www.cmiresearch.com/EthnoConference
Agent-Customer Conversations Offer P/C Insurers New Insight into Sales Process
Bronwen Clark, Qualitative Team Lead, CMI
Insurance Journal podcast – June 3, 2011
Simulating conversations between an insurance agent and a customer during the selling process seems to be providing property/casualty insurers with a more in-depth understanding of successful, and perhaps not so successful communications strategies. In this interview with Insurance Journal’s Andrea Ortega-Wells, Bronwen Clark, qualitative manager for CMI, an Atlanta-based marketing research organization, discusses CMI’s own research model involving simulated agent-customer conversations and how the findings may be changing the way P/C insurers communicate with their customer base and agency force in the future.
Decision Pathway Modeling
Christina Liao, Vice President, Marketing Science, CMI
Society of Insurance Research Annual Conference –November 15, 2010
The presentation explains how companies use results from pathway modeling to develop strategies to convert single line customers into buyers of multiple products. The findings are reinforced with a case study. The session discusses how to achieve the following:
- Identify critical factors that influence a customer to purchase a single product vs. multiple products from your company
- Maximize your resources to motivate customers to purchase multiple lines of insurance coverage
- Understand customer decision processes and the most important elements that influence their purchase decisions
Redefining Segmentation: Using Decision Pathway Segmentation to Link the Motivations of Why and How Consumers Make Decisions with Actual Choices
Christina Liao, Vice President, Marketing Science, CMI & Mike Mabey, Account Manager, CMI
The Market Research Event by IIR, San Diego, CA –November 8, 2010
The presentation highlights a new effective way to identify customer segments that can guide internal stakeholders to target the right customers. The findings are reinforced with a case study.
The Research Arsenal
Jean Fasching, Vice President of Business Development, CMI & Dr. William MacElroy, President, Socratic Technologies
Future Market Leaders Event by IIR, San Diego, CA –November 8, 2010
The presentation focuses on how to use traditional research methods for new insights. The presentation provides guidance and advice for using a wide variety of research methods based on “who + where + with What + When = How.”
A 360° View of Adherence: Using Ethnography to Identify New Opportunities for Pharmaceutical Brands
Laura Winn, Qualitative Research Manager and Ethnographer, CMI
PMRG Institute, Boston, MA –October 26, 2010
The path to greater brand resonance requires marketers to develop a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of their consumer’s “lens on life.” To develop innovative solutions for compliance and adherence, marketers must make a clear connection between their product and all of the ways a particular condition or disease affects how users think about themselves and their experiences. This comprehensive 360-degree view enables more innovative solutions for the brand by providing answers to critical questions, using real examples from a wide range of therapeutic categories and a case study based on ethnographic research with pharmaceutical companies.
Decision Pathway Modeling: Understanding How Your Customers Get to Yes
Anne Hale, Senior Director / Team Leader, Pfizer & Mike Mabey, Account Manager, CMI
The Market Research Event, Las Vegas, NV – October 20, 2009
The session demonstrates how Decision Pathway Modeling can help business professionals understand the linkages among marketing investments, customer actions and purchase decisions. We will demonstrate through a case study how we used the quantitative technique of structural equation modeling (SEM) to identify and quantify the impact of marketing tactics on the purchase decision pathways. The session covers:
- Modeling decision pathways in consumer and business-to-business situations
- Linking consumer behaviors to downstream performance indicator metrics so businesses can prioritize resources to the most important marketing elements
- Understanding market drivers and gaining valuable insight
