Database houses credit card mailings
BAIGlobal Inc., a Tarrytown, N.Y., research firm, has launched a new Web site that provides credit card issuers with competitive intelligence to improve customer retention and usage among cardholders. The site, Inside Track Online, features images of actual credit mail pieces sent to cardholders over the past 13 months. Inside Track Online is updated twice a month with the most-recent scanned images of communications sent to cardholders by their issuers. Since a nationwide sample of 4,500 households sends in their direct mail to BAIGlobal, the service displays mailings from all major credit cards and issuers. As of May, the database contained a full year of archived mailings.
Update of Web collaboration tool
San Francisco-based Facilitate.corn has released version 6.0 of its Facilitate.com Web-based collaboration tool. New to version 6.0 is an integrated Web server and over 100 features that enable non-IT professionals to establish ad-hoc or ongoing collaborative workspaces. It builds upon a core set of brainstorming, categorizing, prioritizing, and action-planning tools by adding new survey capabilities, control panels, and template customization. Version 6.0 also includes new options that enable integration with corporate or departmental Web sites. New features allow work teams to collaborate more effectively in both face-to-face and virtual meeting environments.
QuickTake.com now offers Palm VII functionality
QuickTake.com, an on-line, do-ityourself survey tool, is now offering a wireless capability that allows individuals to download real-time survey results anywhere Palm VII service is available. QuickTake.com is a Web-based tool designed to gather digital opinions. It enables customers to use a question template, or customize their own, to create a survey and launch it onto the Internet. Each survey is save into a library that can be immediately accessed through a Palm VII.
New Web survey service targets point of purchase
Burlingame, Calif.-based Active Research, a provider of Web-based market research automation services, has announced ActiveFlash, a custom Web survey service that surveys ecommerce consumers as they decide what products to buy across the Internet. Businesses can pose questions on any subject and receive market feedback to aid day-to-day decision making. ActiveFlash is administered by Active Research through its partner network, which includes ecommerce destinations such as GO.com, iWon, mySimon, ShopNow, Productopia, and Lycos. ActiveFlash surveys rely on a research method similar to mall intercepts by intercepting consumers at the virtual product shelf - the point of decision online.
BioNutritional reports available on-line
Lansdale, Pa.-based BioValidity has partnered with MarketResearch.com to market and distribute more than 300 scientifically- based vitamin, mineral, and botanical reports generated from the BioNutritional Encyclopedia (BNE) knowledgebase. The BNE is the first in a series of health-related databases to be licensed by BioValidity. The BNE supplement reports have been included in the MarketResearch.com print catalog and Web database, a source of health care, pharmaceuticals, personal care, demographics, industrial goods, and food and beverages industry reports.
Each of the BNE reports contains supplement overviews, descriptions, interactions and precautions, and benefit statements developed by a university research team and approved by the BNE advisory board. The university research team has reviewed more than 50,000 articles in over 800 medical and technical journals to date to develop the BNE content. All supplement benefit statements in BioValidity’s BNE are graded as strong, substantial, limited or minimal to reflect the strength of science supporting them. Reports have also been developed and indexed by body system (e.g., heart) and health concern (e.g., cancer).
SPSS product aimed at managed care industry
Chicago-based SPSS Inc. is now offering VentoMap for Managed Care Organizations (MCO), a business intelligence .solution expressly designed for the managed care industry. The packaged analytical application provides health care executives with views of the trends affecting their business.
Executives receive information in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs) that match the way decision makers think about their business and their approach to solving problems. Examples of managed care KPIs include per member medical cost, members, medical loss ratio, per member revenue, cash balance, per member administrative cost, claims received, claims processed, claim backlog, hospital days per thousand.
Beginning with a packaged analytical application that includes a library of managed care-specific KPIs, SPSS health care and technology consultants work with business users to determine what is important to their managed care organization. They apply a methodology, which includes a health care-specific data model, to set up the data warehouse, map source data to that warehouse, customize the software view and manage the job flow. The resulting solution delivers information, such as KPIs, trend views, and reports that are unique to each business for decision making. The KPIs meet users’ specific information and decision-making needs and are updated daily.
On-line reports profile Michigan markets
Southfield, Mich., consulting firm BBK, Ltd. has launched an e-commerce service for businesses in Michigan and across the U.S. MichiganMapper.com offers Internet access to customized market report packages that include presentation: quality maps and detailed market analyses. The market report packages show businesses where their customers are located, how much money they spend, and how close they are to a retail location.
MichiganMapper.com is targeted to retail firms analyzing their sales areas, manufacturers selecting new business sites, and businesses striving to direct advertising efforts to the most profitable market segments. Reports include custom maps of specific business locations within the state of Michigan, along with: drivetime areas showing what areas can reach the location within 10 minutes; the amount of money a typical household in the area spends on cars, clothing, food, sporting goods and other goods and services; where new customers will be moving over the next five years; demographic information, including population, income, age and other data that helps to identify clusters of customers fitting a particular profile.
Product classifies U.K. Web users
Arlington, Va.-based CACI International Inc. announced that its U.K.-based Marketing Systems Group has launched eTypes, a classification of on-line consumers and their behavioral habits in the U.K. ETypes leverages the knowledge behind ACORN and CACI’s related consumer classification systems to produce a consumer profiling system. ETypes provides five stages and 20 types of behavior, giving users such information as how long consumers stay on one site, how frequently they purchase, what products they are buying, and more. ETypes is the product of a data collaboration between CACI and Fletcher Research, the U.K. subsidiary of Forrester Research, Inc., and supplier of on-line market research data in the U.K. and producer of the UK Internet User Monitor, a survey of on-line U.K. behavior.
Qualitative study of desktop management
Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and InformationWeek magazine are partnering to conduct a new qualitative market research study on maximizing the business value of desktop management. Based on indepth interviews with IT professionals responsible for desktop and server management, EMA’s study will provide market information on desktop and server management practices and products. The study will focus on all areas of desktop management including electronic software distribution, inventory and asset management, licensing, metering, and remote control. EMA’s research also will examine how service providers employ desktop management tools and what role the Internet plays in managing remote and mobile workers.
The research will identify purchasing and deployment plans, while uncovering the selection criteria companies use to purchase desktop management products and services. EMA will analyze the results and compile a detailed picture of the customer requirements and acquisition plans for managing client desktops and servers. The upcoming analysis will be delivered to study sponsors in July 2000.
Harris offers results from ongoing media study; debuts kids research site
Rochester, N.Y., research firm Harris Interactive Inc. is now offering information from its IntermediaPulse, a monthly study that tracks usage of all major media (television, radio, magazines, newspapers and the Internet) as well as time spent with each medium, level of attentiveness to each medium, advertising effectiveness and related supportive behaviors. Using more than 120,000 respondents annually, the study uses a digital diary based on self-reporting that allows each individual respondent to be taken through an entire day from waking up in the morning to prior to going to sleep at night. This survey is administered on the Internet to Internet users and on the telephone to non-Internet users. For each day measured, the product tracks key behaviors such as magazine categories read, TV networks viewed, newspaper reading habits, radio listening location, viewing of a previously recorded television program, rented video viewing and movie attendance, as well as reasons for choosing one media over the other.
Separately, Harris Interactive Inc. has launched The Harris Kid Zone at www.HarrisKidZone.com, an opinion polling site for 8-12-year-old children. Through this site, Harris Interactive will recruit a representative panel of kids who have parental permission to take part in polling and market research projects. The Web site is an extension of HarrisZone.com, a similar site for the more than 400,000 teenagers in the Harris Interactive on-line panel. At launch, children can only join the Harris Kid Zone with the expressed permission of a parent or guardian. The site does not accept advertising and complies with all regulations relating to on-line privacy.
Joint venture tracks tech product movement at distributor level
NPD INTELECT, a Port Washington, N.Y.-based j tint venture of The NPD Group, Inc. and GfK AG, will track distributor-level product movement for the technology industry. By tracldng sell-through at the distributor level, NPD INTELECT can provide situation analyses "one step back," offering perspectives in areas including the business-to-business market that flows through the value added reseller (VAR) channel. The new NPD INTELECT Distributor Report complements INTELECT’s suite of marketing information services that track sellthrough data in the retail, dealer and mail-order channels. The monthly service samples the largest distribution channel players, including Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Merisel, Pinacor, Custom Edge (formerly Inacom) and Hall-Mark. NPD INTELECT’s distributor projection methodology leverages this sample to represent a universe of organizations doing $250 million or more in sales annually. This universe represents better than 90 percent of the $60+ billion in annual sales that circulate through technology distributors. The NPD INTELECT Distributor Report will help technology product manufacturers and distributors pinpoint opportunities and prepare or refine product strategies. Market-, brand-, feature- and item-/model-level sales in units and dollars and distributors’ average prices are available for core technology categories, with additional categories to be named in the future.