Ipsos debuts brand research tools
Ipsos Marketing, a London branch of Paris research company Ipsos, has launched two brand research tools: PerceptorPlus and BrandStretch.
PerceptorPlus is designed to advise consumer product companies on how to optimize consumer share of choice and increase loyalty to their brands using a predictive model that considers a brand’s composition, namely its functional properties, brand image, emotional needs served and personality. It also assesses brand value by taking into account the importance of price to predict brand choice.
BrandStretch aims to help consumer product companies identify categories that represent the best opportunities for extending their brands. The tool answers questions about the brand, its place in the market, the potential opportunities for extending into new categories, addressing new needs and the impact that extension would have on the brand. For more information visit www.ipsosmarketing.com.
Companies partner to offer personalized digital signage
TruMedia Technologies, a Tampa, Fla., research company, and dZine, a Belgian ad agency, have partnered to provide a targeted advertising solution by integrating TruMedia’s PROM (proactive marketing solution) with dZine’s out-of-home digital signage solution. The solution is designed to allow users of the dZine player to trigger advertising content change based on the demographic characteristics of the viewing audience.
The PROM logs viewers in front of the display using a structured feature in the dZine DISplayer. One can choose the data filters to perform targeted marketing. Statistics, created afterwards, show the relation between the played content and demographic composition of the viewer groups by timestamp. The Smart Scheduling system changes the actual playing content depending on the gender and age of the person(s) in front of the display. Conditions can be imposed so the right content is played depending on the gender or age of the audience. For more information visit www.tru-media.com.
Gongos introduces online community
Gongos Research, Auburn Hills, Mich., has debuted Consumer Village, an online community intended to provide companies with a way to conduct qualitative and quantitative research among consumers. Different from a consumer panel, Gongos established Consumer Village as a socially-interactive research network designed to create two-way relationships with consumers.
When used for custom online quantitative research, responses from community members are intended to help target consumer segments and mine insights over time. For exploratory research, flash polls generate reads on consumer attitudes or behavior, with responses emerging within 24 hours, and customized dialogues yield responses that average 70 words. For more information visit www.gongos.com.
Adaptive CBC examines buyer considerations
Sawtooth Software, Sequim, Wash., has released a new adaptive choice-based conjoint (ACBC) system. ACBC is used for studying how people make decisions regarding complex products or services, including price sensitivity, and then predicting their preferences. ACBC’s question flow incorporates the theory that buyers make complex choices by forming a consideration set (typically using cutoff rules) and then choosing a product within that consideration set. It displays relevant products for respondents to consider by patterning them after the preferred product that respondents have first specified using a build-your-own exercise. ACBC aims to capture the specific “must-have” and “unacceptable” rules that respondents use to screen products into their consideration set. For more information visit www.sawtoothsoftware.com.
Confirmit has multimode SaaS on the horizon
Confirmit, an Oslo, Norway, research software company, has launched Confirmit Horizons, an on-demand, multimode platform for market research, customer feedback and employee feedback. Confirmit Horizons version 14 is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution intended to enable market research organizations to deliver multimode research using the Web, telephone interviewing, paper questionnaires, face-to-face interviewing and offline data collection methods.
Core to Confirmit Horizons is a new CATI module for telephone research, designed to give respondents choice when completing surveys and give supervisors capabilities to manage respondents, interviewers and calling activity. A new hosted telephony service is another feature, providing on-demand telephone interviewing. For more information visit www.confirmit.com.
Briefly
Edison, N.J., research company Schlesinger and Associates has launched InspireOpinions, an online patient health and wellness community, through its joint venture with Inspire, a McLean, Va., company that builds and manages online health and wellness communities.
InspireOpinions includes 100,000+ panel members to provide online surveys for qualitative health care research. Each member belongs to at least one of 170 different health and wellness communities. For more information visit www.inspireopinions.com.
The NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., research company, has released weekly e-commerce point-of-sale data for consumer technology categories. NPD’s Ecommerce Weekly Tracking Service is designed to be used in conjunction with NPD’s Weekly Tracking Service, which tracks brick-and-mortar retail sales.
The Ecommerce Weekly Tracking Service collects data from 15 e-commerce retailers, both Vendor.com and PurePlay.com, and is available for 100+ consumer technology categories. With this information retailers and manufacturers can measure industry, category, brand, model and feature-level sales and trends. For more information visit www.npd.com.
New York research company Ziment has debuted COMPOUNDZ, a software tool for decision modeling designed to allow pharmaceutical companies to measure likely uptake of a wide variety of possible new products within the limits of the due diligence process. COMPOUNDZ couples back-end operations with constraints on the complexity of the products to be tested, enabling Ziment to bring decision models (complete with market simulators and outputs) to bear upon decisions pharmaceutical companies make. For more information visit www.ziment.com.
Maponics LLC, a Norwich, Vt., software company, has announced the beta release of the Maponics Spatial API Neighborhood Data to selected existing customers, allowing Maponics to deliver its entire neighborhood dataset via an application programming interface, including all neighborhood boundaries. The database covers 60,000+ neighborhoods in 2,300+ U.S. and Canadian cities and is intended for businesses looking to manage spatial data. For more information visit www.maponics.com.
J.D. Power and Associates, a Westlake Village, Calif., automotive research company, has introduced its Vehicle Launch Index, which provides automakers with information quantifying how well new vehicle models perform during their launch years and examines factors that include turn rate, credit quality, residual factor, dealer gross profit, vehicle price and incentive spend. Performance is measured against industry and segment benchmarks on a monthly basis. The index includes all vehicle launches in the U.S. since 2007 and is tracking current and future vehicle launches. For more information visit www.jdpower.com.
Valient Automotive, a division of Valient Solutions, a New York research firm, has launched iDealerPoll.com, an automotive dealer panel designed to bring automotive dealer insights to the global automotive community. The panel was created based on the market research needs of OEM vehicle manufacturers, OE and aftermarket parts suppliers, financial institutions and dealer support software companies. For more information visit www.valientsolutions.com/automotive.html.
Research International, Chicago, has launched MicroTest Nouveau, a simulated test market system, which aims to deliver sales predictions within consumer packaged goods and incorporate social media trends (such as word-of-mouth). MicroTest Nouveau uses a micro-model approach to commercial forecasting. Consumer choice is examined at an individual level and then aggregated, to allow clients to understand the subtleties of consumer choice, while still delivering the big-picture forecast. For more information visit www.research-int.com.
Cincinnati research company AcuPOLL has announced a new service for testing critical elements of a new product launch. The Total Offer test is designed to examine the effectiveness of concept, product, packaging, advertising and promotion testing in a single phase. The test screens product positioning, advertising mediums, packaging design and introductory promotions as they relate to a new product launch. For more information visit www.acupoll.com.
Lux Research, Boston, has launched a new blog, Lux Populi: The Lux Research Analyst Blog, designed to examine energy and environmental topics of global concern. Information on the blog will include input from Lux analysts, who conduct approximately 2,000 primary interviews each year and visit commercial, academic and government facilities in over 15 countries, and also include secondary research, namely quantitative models and peer review. For more information visit www.luxresearchinc.com.
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, research company Itracks has upgraded its bulletin board focus group software. The upgrade offers additional languages (bringing the total to 20) and user interface enhancements for both moderators and respondents. For more information visit www.itracks.com.
Portland, Ore., research company Revelation has added threaded group discussion features to its qualitative platform Revelation Project. The update is designed to allow researchers to mix group discussion with media blog and diary activities and use Revelation Project QDS for blog and diary exercises, as well as bulletin board focus group projects. For more information visit www.revelationglobal.com.