More than Market Research

Market research, even for the largest organizations, often suffers from one significant issue - it fails to actually build support for your solutions in the market.  Yes, if you're doing it right, you'll gain insight, but as Robert Passikoff points out so elegantly in his book "Predicting Market Success", far too often it is money spent looking in the rear-view mirror.

What it doesn't typically do is build an alliance of champions for your brand or solution, in part because the notion that individuals could be champions for your brand may seem a bit foreign to most businesses.

Here are some ways we address market research mandates:

Enduring advisory boards and advisory panels

These deliver significant value to marketers, both through following a cohort of "consumers" who will use your product, supporting your understanding of the adoption or buying process, and building a community of advocates, or champions, who will support your brand and who can be engaged to help brand grow in a viral way. Our expertise includes recruiting appropriate individuals to belong to each panel, creating strategic models and establishing program objectives, developing engaging meeting agendas and activities to be sure you get the best advice, developing solution champions, and providing full service logistics support.

Online surveys and opinion collection

These can be rapidly deployed in both simple format and in multimedia form.  We're even experimenting with the ability to collect video, in response to open-ended questions, from those being surveyed over the internet, so that we can better process and understand.

Lexical semantic analysis

This interesting methodology, long in the realm of academics, helps savvy marketers better understand brand personalities in their market space, leveraging insights published on the web and accessed through search engines.

Q-methodology

We're excited to have added Q-methodology to our service offerings; it allows a study of subjectivity, turning "conventional research" 90 degrees!  Want to find out more about market segmentation?  Q-methodology can help steer you through opinion-based market segmentation.  

Environmental scans

Our team has participated in environmental scans which collected significant data about health policy in Canada.  We commissioned/developed a customizable online framework ideal for executing multi-informant environmental scans.

Key informant interviews

We've done a lot of key informant interviewing - from crafting discussion guides and conducting these interviews by phone to use of online communication technologies.

Guiding Star Communications and Consulting provides rich experience and expertise with modern and novel market insight methods.   It all adds up to better understanding your market and engaging in better dialog with it.  Insight.  Gained.  Shared.