Focus group findings delivered on CD-ROM
Poole Consulting, a San Ramon, Calif., research firm, has launched FocusView, a multimedia product that gives subscribers findings from focus groups with respondents in selected target markets. Subscribers customize their own questions and then see and hear what their target market is thinking through the delivery of the results on CD-ROM Media Kits. The Media Kits combine text, video, and the voice of the customer. Subscribers receive a full presentation report with video clips of the discussions, an executive summary and an appendix with their custom information. FocusView conducts a series of qualitative research sessions through the year (spring, fall, winter). Each session consists of five focus groups across major U.S. markets for a total of 15 focus groups in each subscription. Focus group discussions relate to buying behavior, desires, problems, needs, and hot topics. Based on these sessions, FocusView Media Kits are developed. The Media Kits also provide speaker notes to help subscribers present the information to others within their company.
Track and analyze shoppers’ paths
WhereNet Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., has formed a strategic alliance with Sorensen Associates, a Troutdale, Ore., research firm, to provide tracking applications for consumer packaged goods retailers and manufacturers. Using WhereNet’s wireless Real-Time Locating System (RTLS), Sorensen has developed the PathTracker system to electronically track and analyze the paths and behaviors of shoppers. The PathTracker shopper monitor and merchandising system uses the RTLS infrastructure installed in retail stores to capture data about consumers’ shopping patterns from the point they enter the store to checkout. By analyzing shoppers’ traffic patterns and time elapsed in certain aisles or in front of specific point-of-purchase displays, store managers and consumer product manufacturers have access to data to make decisions about how to best merchandise their products and increase sales.
The PathTracker system features active radio-frequency WhereTags mounted on shopping carts and baskets, WhereNet antennas inside the store that receive transmissions from the WhereTags every few seconds, and WhereNet visibility software that receives the location information from the antennas. The system uses this information to calculate and record in the database the shoppers’ specific locations as they walk through the store. By integrating data of a shopper’s "trail" with the positional coordinates of all products in the store and product purchases from checkout scanners, the PathTracker post-processing statistical methods yield research in the form of tables, charts, and graphs.
CPM expands health care index
Customer Potential Management (CPM), an East Peoria, Ill., CRM firm has expanded its predictive health care index to provide health care executives comprehensive customer information and predictive market segmentation to help identify health care needs in specific geographic areas, industries, or medical specialties. By building a database in-house of 260 million U.S. individuals and 112 million households, CPM can now offer market lists that are selected by its proprietary CHUI segmentation system. CHUI stands for Consumer Healthcare Utilization Index. The index provides a relative ranking, a number between 0-999 to indicate an individual’s propensity to use specific health care services. The higher the score, the greater the likelihood the individual would need the service in the category selected. CHUI offers more than 200 scores in three medical areas: based on medical diagnostic codes (MDC); the top-identified diseases and procedures of the 21 st century and ICD-9 codes; and diagnostic related groups (DRGs).
CHUI scores can be applied to lists by region and specialty, allowing providers, payers, device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies to select only certain segments based on desired score ranges for more strategic disease management, service utilization, campaigns, and long-term planning.
Handheld survey system from Perseus
Perseus Development Corporation, a Braintree, Mass., research software firm, has released Perseus MobileForms, a new mobile information collection software system. MobileForms is designed to help organizations with their entire mobile data management process: form creation, deployment to Palm devices, results collection, and reporting and analysis. With MobileForms, survey forms are deployed on a handheld device, eliminating the need for paper-based surveys. Form creation is done using Perseus SurveySolutions’ word processing interface. The forms are transferred to the handheld device using the wireless Internet library or one-touch wire-based hot sync. Responses are collected and stored on the handheld device and transferred through wireless or wire-based connections to either an Internet SQL database or a desktop Microsoft Access database. Perseus, MobileForms is used to collect, analyze, and report data for a wide-range of applications including market research, customer service, field sales reporting, inventory management, site inspections, and field audits. Perseus MobileForms is licensed per handheld device. Support for form design for the Palm device is included with SurveySolutions Professional and Enterprise products version 4.1 and above. Wireless support requires Perseus SurveySolutions Enterprise.
Sage debuts online tech roundtables
Sage Research, Inc., Natick, Mass., has launched the Sage Technology Roundtables, a monthly series of online focus groups with qualified high-tech enterprise decision-makers. Each Roundtable examines issues surrounding a specific technology or service by talking with the managers and executives who buy and use the technologies. Participants are selected from the Sage Panel, which includes professionals who evaluate, use, and purchase information technology-related products. Sage Research staff moderate the sessions, and participants are pre-screened for relevant technology knowledge and decision-making authority.
On July 8th from 6:00-7:00 p.m. EDT a Roundtable session will focus on virtual private networks (VPNs) and address the following questions: What are the current perceptions regarding the adequacy of IP VPN security, and what can vendors do to address security concerns? Are network managers willing to pay a premium for VPNs with VoIP capabilities? Do IP VPN early adopters prefer network-based or CPE-based VPNs, and why?
NOP World Health adds diabetes patient study
East Hanover, N.J.-based NOP World Health is now offering the Diabetes Patient Market Study, which has been produced by its sister company, RoperASW, since 1989. The 2002 U.S. Diabetes Patient Market Study is based on a nationally representative sample of 2,000 diagnosed patients. Results can be compared with findings from Diabetes Patient Market Studies in other major regions around the world, including Europe, Canada, Latin America, and Asia. The study includes information on: the size and growth of the overall market, as well as of treatment segments, such as insulin, oral anti-diabetic agents (OAAs), diet-only and blood glucose self-monitoring; multi-year trending of market expansion and diabetes care patterns; daily therapeutic and monitoring behavior, including types and volume of insulin used, brands of OAAs and blood glucose monitoring frequency; manufacturer and brand competitive positions; and product/brand switching behavior. Pharmaceutical companies can choose to purchase the entire study package or individual sections. Standalone options include a market overview, insulin medications, insulin injections, or any other combinations of these sections companies select. All options provide the database, including the report and tabulations, in Quanvert format.
Track detail visits with Detail Watch
Pharmaceutical companies can now measure their own and competitive physician details - including message recall, perceptions and effectiveness - with Detail Watch from Market Measures/Cozint, East Hanover, N.J. Conducted over the Intemet, Detail Watch captures call information, directly from a company’s target doctors, within hours of a sales visit. Three levels of analyses let users match their research to their specific needs: Detail Watch-1 is a core analysis that evaluates message recall and perceptions, rep targeting strategies, competitive activity, and detail specifics such as sales aid quality and call length. In addition, it delivers verbatims, a message report card with comparisons to industry benchmarks, and next steps for increasing sales results. Detail Watch-2 adds effectiveness dimensions, including, message and sales rep quality, promotional impact on physician attitudes and behaviors, performance drivers of message and rep effectiveness, and recommended areas for improvement. It also features multivariate analytics to determine new approaches for improving sales impact. Detail Watch-3 integrates prescribing, rep and call information. By incorporating these additional metrics, Detail Watch-3 provides a view of call effectiveness. Secondary prescribing data reveals what doctors are prescribing - and which promotional elements drove their decisions. Call insights reveal the relationship between number of visits and prescribing volume. Finally, rep feedback provides input from both the salesperson and the doctor.
ArcGIS StreetMap Europe now shipping
Redlands, Calif., GIS firm ESRI is now offering ArcGIS StreetMap Europe, an extension to the ArcGIS software providing users with European street map display and geocoding. With ArcGIS StreetMap Europe, ArcGIS users can access street level data for most major western European countries. The new extension includes street level data coverage for Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. The product offers the following capabilities: graphic display of streets and other geographic features; display of the geocoded location of a single address as a graphic point on the StreetMap layer; writing geocoded locations of addresses in a table into a new point feature class; auto-labeling of the StreetMap layer; and ability to export the StreetMap features into other feature classes.
ArcGIS StreetMap Europe uses NAVTECH NAVSTREETS data that is offered in two different data options: general roads or detailed streets. The general roads option is a single data set that covers all of the listed countries.
Database covers on-premise alcohol consumption
Trade Dimensions, Wilton, Conn., announces the syndication of its new On-Premise database, which now delivers universal coverage of on-premise outlets where liquor, wine-and-or beer are consumed. This new database incorporates the TDLinx coding structure to provide liquor, wine and beer suppliers with a consistent framework for information about on-premise outlets. Working with suppliers and associations in the alcohol beverage industry, Trade Dimensions established on-premise standardized trade channels and formats.
Trade Dimensions has also enhanced its retail/off-premise database offering by adding fields that indicate the sale of liquor, beer and wine. The addition of these 270,000 on-premise outlets brings the Trade Dimensions database to over 600,000 stores and outlet records.
CustomerSat updates eCEM system
Mountain View, Calif., research firm CustomerSat, Inc., has released an update of its Enterprise Customer Experience Management (eCEM) system. ECEM 4.4 identifies at a glance which feedback is significant at 95 percent, 90 percent, and 80 percent confidence levels. By churning through crosstabulation data and graphically displaying which attribute and demographic sector differences are significant, release 4.4 lets managers identify and focus attention on significant problems and opportunities. Its analytics show managers whether the difference between mean satisfaction scores for two products, regions, or maintenance contract types are significant. Similarly, managers can tell, for example, whether the differences in the percent of eastern region vs. western region respondents who will renew are significant.
IMS unveils Marketing Effectiveness Suite
IMS Health has launched its new Effectiveness Suite of applications designed to help pharmaceutical marketing professionals address questions asked throughout the product lifecycle. The new suite - which provides answers to users’ business questions in narrative and graphical formats -integrates marketplace intelligence from IMS prescription, sales, promotional, managed care and medical databases. Applications in the Marketing Effectiveness Suite feature a question-and-answer format that streamlines information exchange among all levels of pharmaceutical business users. Users can benchmark competitive performance, gather market intelligence, track product performance and pinpoint new business opportunities.
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Walker Information, Indianapolis, has released its patent-pending system, Walker SmartLoyalty, a customer loyalty management system combining market research and technology applications to provide real-time, enterprise-wide information. SmartLoyalty collects information to help companies forecast revenue growth from existing customers based on their attitudes and perceptions, and better understand how they can influence those attitudes to generate more loyal customers.
SPSS has integrated LexiQuest’s text mining software, LexiQuest Mine, with SPSS’s data mining workbench, Clementine. LexiQuest Mine is a linguistics-based text mining application that enables users to identify key concepts, and the relationships between them, when working, with thousands of read or unread documents. Clementine discovers the patterns and relationships in numeric data. With the integration of these two technologies, customers can access LexiQuest Mine from the Clementine user interface and incorporate the text data into the regular fiow of the data-mining process.
Doane Marketing Research, Inc., St. Louis, will produce a shared-cost market research study entitled "Difficult to Control Weeds in Glyphosate Tolerant Crops (U.S.)."
MarketResearch.com is now offering the free "Alert Me" service to allow subscribers to keep up to date on new studies available in their areas of interest. Notifications are delivered every two weeks when relevant reports by any of 350 market research publishers are available.
Ipsos-New Media Research has signed an agreement with Lunarstorm, a Scandinavian youth Web portal hosting more than 950,000 registered members in the 14-35 age segment. The deal grants Ipsos-New Media Research the right to research the Swedish population. With more than 25 socio-demographic variables known about the members, researchers can draw targeted samples. Ipsos-New Media Research will offer the panel to end-clients and to other market research companies.
NPDFashionworld, Port Washington, N.Y., has launched Athletic Footwear Solution Folders, a dedicated athletic footwear presence on its Web site. At www.npdfashionworld.com, subscribers now gain access to point-of-sale and consumer information for women’s, men’s, and children’s athletic footwear.
The Consumer Network, a Philadelphia research firm, and The Grand Group, a Chicago marketing agency, have released a report on brand-consumer relationships for major brands in 40 product categories ranging from airlines to underwear. The Brand Involvement report includes capsule descriptions of each brand as well as verbatim comments from consumers who participated in research conducted during development of the report.
TeleSage Inc., a Seattle survey software firm, has formed a partnership with Fisher Communications, a Seattle communications and media company that allows TeleSage to host research projects at a secure facility in the Fisher Plaza. Through this partnership, TeleSage expects to introduce market research companies to the benefits of using interactive voice response and Intemet surveys for the exchange of information with consumers.