••• research communities

Passenger FUELs engagement platform

Aids development of insight communities

Los Angeles research company Passenger has launched its FUEL (Fast User Engagement and Listening) Community Engine, a SaaS engagement platform designed to develop insight communities of customers, partners and employees and to allow communication online, on mobile devices and on social media networks. The software includes quantitative survey tools and qualitative feedback techniques. Some key features: flexible design; scalable size and segmentation capabilities; rapid setup enables short-term projects, small advisory boards, enterprise voice-of-customer programs and communities of all sizes (no limit on the number of members in a community); custom-branded mobile apps for Android and iOS; applications, including fully integrated Qualtrics survey tools and Tableau-based analytics dashboards, responsive design, sentiment analysis and brand intelligence tools; multilanguage translation abilities to address globalization requirements for any business and any language; document sharing and streaming and a new live chat module; and social media integration options, including social sharing.

www.thinkpassenger.com/quirks

••• qualitative research

Qual Tracker combines qual with text analytics

Audience, KPI and Competitive

Denver research firm iModerate has launched Qual Tracker, a suite of longitudinal qualitative software programs which combines iModerate’s cognitive framework with text analytics. The programs, titled Audience Tracker, KPI Tracker and Competitive Tracker, are designed to engage consumers so companies can track their changing interests and can be more proactive in identifying opportunities.

Audience Tracker lets clients go beyond market and behavioral data and establish consumer intimacy in order to stay on top of their audiences’ changing desires, attitudes and behaviors. KPI Tracker helps understand the drivers behind key performance indicator movement and shed light on what to improve and what to replicate to proactively impact the numbers. Competitive Tracker is intended to help clients gauge consumers’ perception of and relationship with their competition and attachment to their offerings, ensuring they know where they stand, how to react and how to move forward.

Each offering is available independently and revolves around a monthly minimum of professionally-moderated conversations, with approximately 80 percent of the discussion remaining consistent month over month and 20 percent open to address ad hoc client needs. Reporting is based on aggregate consumer feedback and advanced metrics such as conceptual relationship mapping and occurs at both monthly and quarterly intervals.

www.imoderate.com

••• new product research

GfK tool informs product, service launches

Measures behavior rather than intentions

Nuremberg, Germany, research company the GfK Group has launched GfK MarketBuilder, a management tool aimed at identifying the factors leading to the successful market launch of new products and services. MarketBuilder is designed to use actual consumer behavior in measuring innovation performance rather than stated intentions. GfK MarketBuilder can provide a holistic understanding of the drivers of adoption, so that brands can proactively manage the areas that really matter and translate this understanding into informed decision-making by using scenario planning and relevant performance metrics to forecast sales. It aims to reorient the brand’s innovation management to focus on behavior-centric KPIs, supporting a sustained improvement in innovation performance.

www.gfk.com/marketmaker

••• neuromarketing

Service calibrates consumers’ reaction times

Weighs the impact of ads, brands

Paris research company Ipsos and NEUROHM, a Warsaw-based neuroscience specialist, have partnered to upgrade the Ipsos Implicit Reaction Time (IRT) system. IRT is designed to use calibrated reaction time to measure the strength of unconscious preferences and their impact on consumer behavior. The tools capture how consumers are unconsciously impacted by brands, ads, products, packages and concepts in contrast to what they overtly say in the conscious, more considered, explicit realm. The method is based upon algorithms that calibrate individual response speeds with the goal of eliminating biasing variables. IRT can function as a module embedded within more traditional surveys to provide an integrated perspective on both conscious and unconscious aspects of consumer response.

www.ipsos.com

••• advertising research

On Device service looks at impact of mobile ads

Uses control vs. exposed groups

On Device Research, London, has launched an advertising effectiveness measurement tool for mobile surveys. The tool is designed to provide measurements of awareness, consideration and purchase intent. It uses the unique mobile IDs of its panel of mobile respondents who are retargeted with campaign ads and later invited to participate in the brand metrics survey. Results of the control vs. exposed group are displayed in a Web-based dashboard.

Brand advertisers have been reluctant to move budgets to mobile as traditional cookie-based tracking makes it difficult to reliably measure the brand uplift of campaigns. On Device reports that a project with Sony and MediaCom confirmed the effect of brand advertising on mobile, showing a significant uplift in spontaneous awareness (23 percent point difference) and brand and purchase intent (19 percent point difference) between the exposed and control group.

www.ondeviceresearch.com

••• health care research

Tracking health data chatter on Twitter

What are the influencers saying?

WCG, a San Francisco social media company, and the Health Data Consortium (HDC), Washington, D.C., have created the Health Data Conversation Radar, designed to track health data conversations in Twitter postings among U.S. doctors, members of Congress and top U.S. health data media influencers. The Radar will display trending keywords, top influencers, conversation volume and a live Tweetstream. A demo version is available at www.hdcradar.com. The HDC is a collaboration of government, non-profit and private sector organizations aimed at improving the availability and use of health data. The debut of the Health Data Conversation Radar is the starting point for the HDC-WCG partnership, which will also deliver regular reporting on insights to HDC’s members to help educate them and enhance their understanding of online conversations about health data and in turn promote more effective communication and sharing of open data across the health care spectrum.

••• text analytics

Partnership yields text analysis for SurveyMonkey

Free trial for DiscoverText users

SurveyMonkey, Palo Alto, Calif., has partnered with Amherst, Mass., software company Texifter to use Texifter’s DiscoverText platform in managing large numbers of verbatim responses. The interface between the programs is designed to allow SurveyMonkey users to import their existing survey data and have access to online data feeds including key social media networks.

DiscoverText users will be able to log in to SurveyMonkey to import existing survey data. Researchers can use a 30-day free trial to use DiscoverText’s tools on open-ended answers and on structured survey metadata. Texifter’s “five pillars of text analytics” approach combines search, filtering, clustering, human-coding and machine-learning. Once registered on DiscoverText, newcomers have access to a range of online data feeds. Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, WordPress, Disqus and Twitter data can be gathered, managed and analyzed in DiscoverText alongside SurveyMonkey responses, e-mail and other forms of text data.

http://textifer.com

••• customer loyalty

Qualtrics adds Bain-certified NPS function

Track and act on VOC feedback

Provo, Utah, software company Qualtrics has combined its survey technology platform with Bain and Company’s customer loyalty expertise to create a Net Promoter Score (NPS) software tool. The Qualtrics Bain-certified NPS wizard helps organizations launch a functionally-accurate NPS survey, allowing them to track and act on voice-of-the-customer feedback. Additionally, built-in reporting allows organizations to view and contribute to industry benchmarks and to understand how their business compares to others within the industry.

www.qualtrics.com

••• predictive modelling

New simulation tool from Hall & Partners

Run experiments in virtual markets

London research company Hall & Partners has partnered with London technology firm Simudyne to launch a new predictive modelling and simulation tool called Avatar, aimed at helping businesses forecast the factors that will impact most on their brands’ futures. The Avatar software is designed to create virtual people, with real-world data determining their behavior, and then safely run experiments in virtual markets. The virtual markets allow clients to repeatedly make scenario adjustments to determine the most effective ways to influence future behavior, drive sales and increase profitability. Avatar is also designed to serve as an early warning system, enabling actions to be taken sooner than would otherwise be possible. The open-architecture platform connects clients to real-world data sources and feeds into Hall & Partners proprietary Hub data integration platform.

www.hallandpartners.com/avatar

••• Briefly

ThinkNow Research, Burbank, Calif., has launched an online Spanish-language ad software platform which assesses 15- and 30-second television ads and is linked to a normative database. The software is designed to measure ad recall, purchase intent, commercial and brand attributes and other key measures of ad effectiveness.

www.thinknowresearch.com

Atlanta research company CMI has launched its yPrescribe software, designed to identify factors which influence a physician’s prescribing loop by simulating real-world behavior using a patient profile generator.

www.cmiresearch.com

London advertising firm CScreens has launched an eye-tracking tool capable of measuring the number of people viewing a billboard, how long they look at it, their gender and approximate age.

www.cbrandslimited.com

Wilton, Conn., research firm Toluna is offering its TolunaMobile Diary app to its panel community clients. The app is designed to capture in-the-moment feedback from community members and to provide a flexible method of presenting questions and responses to users available for Apple and Android phones and tablets, with the options of presenting and uploading images, using a UPC barcode scanner and sending reminders to respondents to enter information.

www.toluna-group.com

Swift Research, Wetherby, U.K., and Amarach Research, Dublin, have joined to create a consumer panel of food lovers for research projects in Great Britain and Ireland. Each company will contribute its own industry specialists to the partnership project.

www.swift-research.co.uk/

Vision One Research, London, has added a U.K. benchmarking option to its StaffProbe employee satisfaction survey which will allow clients to compare their results with national norms.

www.visionone.co.uk

Hailey, Idaho, software company Marketron has established two resource databases, the Marketron Mobile and Interactive Idea Vaults. The databases include client case studies, marketing research, implementation best practices and metrics for media companies.

www.marketron.com

New York research company OnePoint Global is offering Tellme, a free mobile survey app designed to provide researchers with access to mobile survey ideas from around the world and across research sectors. The app provides different questionnaire designs and formats for mobile surveys and can be downloaded at http://appwebsite.onepointglobal.com.

Five focus group facilities have joined the Dialed In affiliate program of Beaverton, Ore., research company Dialsmith. These include Focus Plus, New York; PVR Research, Atlanta; Observation Baltimore, Baltimore; Fieldwork O’Hare, Chicago; and Viewpoint Europe, Hamburg and Frankfurt, Germany.

www.dialsmith.com

Mission Measurement, a Chicago consulting firm, has launched the Social Value Index. The Index includes the Social Value Score and the Social Value Scorecard and is aimed at identifying and quantifying consumer demand within an industry; rankings of industry competitors and the estimated revenue increase for improving its Social Value Score.

http://missionmeasurement.com

Usability Sciences, a research company in Irving, Texas, has launched Omni-Channel, designed to gather feedback on a brand from Web, mobile, social media, and brick-and-mortar sources.

www.usabilitysciences.com

Denver technology company GeoPoll has begun the first overnight television ratings service in several African countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda. The service area will expand to additional countries in the coming months, including DR Congo, Tunisia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Cameroon. 

http://research.geopoll.com/

Cambridge, Mass., research company InCrowd has added a Peer2Peer feature to its on-demand platform, designed to allow physicians to ask open-ended questions of colleagues and receive confidential responses in a double-blinded manner.

www.incrowdnow.com

New York marketing firm Sizmek has released its Sizmek Attribution Suite, designed to provide cross-channel attribution analysis of digital marketing campaigns. The software is aimed at helping agencies collect and analyze the impact of each point of contact with consumers, identifying the most effective media.

www.sizmek.com

Demand Metric, an Ontario research company, has developed a Digital Marketing Maturity Model which is designed to assist organizations in assessing their digital marketing, determining where they are on the maturity continuum and finding options for improvement.

www.demandmetric.com

Boston retail company Mobee announced its new dashboard software, designed to use in-store data collected by its mobile app, which enlists mystery shopping volunteers to rate retailers and restaurants and post photos of stores, aisles and shelves. The dashboard measures store- and channel-level performance for new products rollouts, promotions and competitive intelligence and can issue alerts on urgent in-store issues.

www.getmobee.com

Quintiles, a Durham, N.C., pharmaceutical company, and Modern Marketing Concepts, a Binghamton, N.Y., marketing firm, have partnered to create a marketing analytics program which combines proprietary channel preference data with the Next Action Marketing platform. The program is designed to optimize the positioning and marketing of biopharma products by creating physician communication strategies which align with their preferences and behavior.

www.quintiles.com

Aha! Online Research, Detroit, has launched the next generation of its DIY online qualitative research platform, designed to include social and mobile-friendly features.

http://ahaonlineresearch.com

NewBrandAnalytics, a Washington, D.C., software company, has launched Pulse, a social listening platform aimed at extracting targeted insights from unstructured social media and survey data. The proprietary software is designed to enable researchers to gather individual comments, discover trends and react in real-time.

www.newbrandanalytics.com

St. Louis marketing company aisle411 has combined its indoor retail mapping software with Google’s Project Tango. The new platform is designed to allow participants to search for products in a 3-D reality experience and find personalized coupons, offers and rewards.

http://aisle411.com

L&E Research, Raleigh, N.C., has expanded to Cincinnati by opening a new office and focus group facility at the former QFact location.

www.leresearch.com

New York nonprofit the Digital Advertising Alliance has developed an app version and a mobile-optimized version of its existing desktop choice tool, aimed at providing consumers control over targeted advertising on their mobile devices. Both versions are designed to allow users to opt out entirely from relevant ads or select the companies providing the ads.

www.aboutads.info

San Francisco research company CfMC has released version 8.7.1 of its Survox Dialer (formerly known as the CfMC Dialer or Celeus Dialer) and Survent multimode survey management platform.

www.cfmc.com/

The Nevada Commission on Tourism (NCOT) and London research firm TNS Global have partnered to develop a new ROI measure for destination marketing campaigns. The program is designed to evaluate all points of contact with potential visitors by placing tags on all NCOT digital media and running effectiveness diagnostics of all paid, free or owned media, such as the NCOT Web site and social media sites.

www.tnsglobal.com

New York health care consulting firm Kantar Health has launched PINNAKLE, a brand-marketing solution aimed at helping companies maximize the success of their brands by integrating data from many sources and by combining information, research and consulting expertise. PINNAKLE is designed to provide a scientific approach to launches, evidence-based measurement of results and forward-looking marketing.

www.kantarhealth.com

Pulsar, the social media division of London research company Cello, has launched FLOW, a platform designed to allow clients to manage all social media channels from one place and to coordinate large social media teams. Pulsar also launched TEAM, a social media analytics tool which is designed to enable clients to track and manage activity on their internal collaboration platforms.

www.cellogroup.com

Ipsos MediaCT, a division of Paris research company Ipsos, and the Readership Works, a marketing company in New South Wales, Australia, have added a new engagement metric, designed to demonstrate a reader’s relationship with printed newspapers and magazines, to its emma (Enhanced Media Metrics Australia) readership survey.

www.ipsos.com/mediact

San Antonio, Texas, media firm Clear Channel Media and Entertainment has launched the Audience Delivery Optimizer, a proprietary radio targeting tool designed to match its listeners with political databases, providing predictions about which voter segment is listening to which station and at what time. It is aimed at enabling local and national political campaigns to target key voter segments using radio and will be available for the 2014 campaign cycle.

www.clearchannel.com

Santa Clara, Calif., software companies DropThought Inc. and Clover, San Francisco, have launched the DropThought app, which is integrated with the Clover point-of-sale system. The app is designed to allow customers to provide instant feedback either on the Clover signature screen or via e-mail, text or print receipts.

www.dropthought.com

Beta Research Corporation, Syosset, N.Y., has added PREDICT to its existing platform of online panel software. The software is designed to use online research panels of respondents to create one or more insight communities which can be global or local, targeted or broad, short-term or long-term, as needed.

www.nybeta.com

New York software company Pyne has launched its Pyne app, designed to provide a quick questionnaire which respondents can then share with social media contacts.

www.getpyne.com

Redwood City, Calif., marketing company YuMe Inc., has released an interactive Reach Calculator, which computes unduplicated advertising reach across TV, online, smartphone, tablet and connected TV. The Reach Calculator was designed during projects with New York researcher the Nielsen Company on multiscreen reach and brand impact.

www.yume.com

AppsFlyer, a New York software company, has launched AppsFlyer for Agencies, a mobile ad monitoring program designed for agencies and advertisers to measure and manage their mobile marketing.

www.appsflyer.com/

BestToolBars, the Alexandria, Va., Internet company, has launched a Heatmap feature designed to provide online market researchers with information on the behavior of their Web site visitors. The Heatmap tool pinpoints hot spots, analyzes which elements of the page attract the most attention and allows marketers to track mouse moves, clicks and scrolling.

www.besttoolbars.net

Dallas software company Satisware has launched Helprace, designed to be a new community for businesses to create hubs for support, marketing, promotion and gathering of user feedback.

www.satisware.com