Kinesis rolls out multimode, multilingual survey capabilities
Austin, Texas, research company Kinesis Survey Technologies’ Kinesis Survey product now provides full support for multimode (Web/wireless) multilingual projects, including those requiring use of multibyte UTF-8 characters to present all common languages worldwide including Arabic, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese and Japanese characters.
Among the new multilingual features are full multilingual support for both Web and wireless or dual-mode surveys; unicode (UTF-8) support; and translation via XML documents.
Translations utilize an XML document format, which is compatible with SDLX and similar translation software commonly used by translators. By maintaining an XML document format, the translation software utilizes translation memory and fully automates translations of similar sentences and phrases, therefore reducing the cost and time needed for translating similar surveys.
The XML document format contains all question texts, button labels, system error messages and other customizable text. The translation document also contains localizable data, such as date format and currency, allowing translations to be done independently from the programmed survey logic and without the need to understand the survey flow. For more information visit www.kinesissurvey.com.
Boston Analytics unveils quantitative marketing research services
Boston-based knowledge services company Boston Analytics has released its new Quantitative Marketing Research (QMR) service that is intended to provide companies greater depth in sector, customer and industry knowledge. Researchers in the U.S. and India will collect, maintain and analyze data about values, demographics and locations of buyers and prospects to help determine optimum pricing, differentiate products from those of competitors and maximize the probability of new product success.
Boston Analytics’ QMR service can assist clients in collecting data via the Internet (Web-based surveys, business or household panels), telephone or mail; maintain data using custom-built, time-series or cross-sectional repositories; and analyze the data to gain insights using standard reporting and statistical tools, including tabulation, crosstabs and correlation, as well as more analytical tools like linear and non-linear regression, cluster and latent-class analyses and classification methods.
The new practice will be spearheaded by Murli Rao. For more information visit www.bostonanalytics.com.
Northern Light launches revision of meaning extraction tool
Cambridge, Mass., research company Northern Light has launched its second major release of MI Analyst, an automated “meaning extraction” application designed specifically for market intelligence, market research and product research. By combining free-text searching with advanced text analytics, MI Analyst is intended to improve a researcher’s ability to analyze reports from internal and external sources, identifying the strategy issues and suggesting the business implications of the analyzed content.
MI Analyst can be used to analyze news, published syndicated research and specialty databases of particular interest to pharmaceutical research, like patents. MI Analyst reads available news articles as well as all the market intelligence and research reports that a company creates or licenses from third-party sources. The application tells the researcher what is in the documents that are returned by a search query, suggesting what business issues they address, and then directs the researcher to the documents that are most interesting based on their meaning rather than on their statistically-derived search relevance. In addition, MI Analyst can discern the tone of content - for example, assessing which market research reports and research analysts reflect a positive sentiment and which ones demonstrate a negative sentiment about a company and its competitors.
MI Analyst 2.0 adds new facets by which the software can analyze search results, extracting meaning from internal and research documents, licensed secondary research, news stories and Web sources. Joining the previously released facets (companies, venture-funded companies, IT technologies, IT markets), new and expanded facets include government agencies, industries, business issues and strategic scenarios.
Also new in MI Analyst 2.0 is a facility intended to improve the value of search results based on the proximity of specified terms or phrases to each other, and more importantly, to any of the terms in any of the facets in MI Analyst.
MI Analyst expands beyond its roots in the IT sector to the pharmaceutical industry research. New facets relevant to pharmaceuticals include human anatomy, diseases, drugs, cells, cell receptors, proteins, genes, enzymes, pharmaceutical markets, life sciences scenarios and research strategies and therapeutic approaches.
MI Analyst is immediately available from Northern Light as an added-value option for SinglePoint enterprise market research portals and as an integrated capability within Analyst Direct, Northern Light’s subscription-based market research search engine. For more information visit www.northernlight.com.
IRI debuts two new products
Chicago researcher Information Resources Inc. (IRI), has unveiled two new solutions in automated and predictive analysis capabilities: IRI Price Promotion Simulator and IRI Assortment Drivers. These offerings are intended to provide manufacturers and retailers with the capacity to refine their decision-making, as well as advance their understanding of the CPG retail marketplace.
IRI Price Promotion Simulator offers a Web-based software solution that can provide CPG and retail industry decision makers with time-sensitive comparative analysis of price promotion plans through the use of predictive market simulations. Allowing users to create multiple price and promotion plans on the fly, Price Promotion Simulator helps industry executives determine which event approach provides the best ROI and compares the plan post-promotion with actual execution.
IRI Assortment Drivers offers a Web-based capability that simultaneously evaluates the impact of marketing options for every stock-keeping unit (SKU) against every other SKU among competing products within a determined category. Through a process that evaluates shifting marketing support behind a given product, assesses marketing changes of other products and stores in the marketplace and uses third-party survey research to simulate new marketing concepts, IRI Assortment Drivers is intended to allow CPG retailers and manufacturers to assess market opportunities and design targeted product strategy plans.
Price Promotion Simulator and Assortment Drivers join both IRI Drivers on Demand, a model-informed Web application reporting key drivers of period-to-period sales, and Demand Forecaster, a turnkey forecasting, marketing planning and tracking solution, as the core of IRI’s Automated Analytics set of solutions. For more information visit www.infores.com.
Separately, IRI is integrating Umbria’s social media research capabilities into the IRI New Product Innovation and Launch Solutions suite of services. Umbria is designed to assess both what is being said and who is doing the speaking in the online world, enabling the company to classify posts and estimate gender and age of the speaker, as well as identify and eliminate bogus spam posts. Umbria analyzes voices of the online community by using proprietary Natural Language Processing and machine-learning algorithms to dissect the who, what and why of online opinion.
With this integration, IRI customers can glean product and industry intelligence by ”listening” to unfiltered conversations taking place on social networking sites, blogs, chatrooms, message boards and other consumer-generated media. Customers can then integrate this research data with other research to develop products more in tune with consumer interests, as well as launch and promote them more effectively.
IRI’s New Product Innovation and Launch Solutions helps CPG and retail companies gain product insights, such as what people are saying - unprompted - about a brand, market opportunities for new products, new product ideas and customer information to identify both existing and new market segments.
IRI’s New Product Innovation and Launch Solutions suite includes additional solutions, including IRI Behavior Scan, IntroSource, AtittudeLink, IntroCast, Product Locator and New Product Profiler. For more information visit www.umbrialistens.com.
Illumin8 brightens language search technology for Elsevier
Amsterdam-based information company Elsevier has released illumin8, a Web-based research tool that integrates natural language search technology with content from Elsevier’s full-text scientific articles, scientific abstracts, patents and Web sources to provide users solutions for research initiatives.
Illumin8 combines search and semantic indexing technologies to gather meaning, purpose and insight. The research tool extracts and analyzes solutions, which are then categorized under organizations, products, technologies, approaches and experts. Illumin8 is designed to go beyond simple keyword search, finding and extracting summarized answers and interrelationships that are semantically related to the context of the search query. Illumin8 users will also be able to access the full text of Elsevier journals if they have an online subscription to the journal through ScienceDirect.
To build illumin8, Elsevier has partnered with Manassas, Va., research software company NetBase. For more information visit www.illumin8.com.
New research practice for automotive sector
Rochester, N.Y., research company Valient Solutions has created Valient Automotive, a new practice intended to serve the automotive sector. Valient Automotive’s online focus group solution can provide an alternative to traditional focus groups for advertising and product testing. Consumers and clients can participate in focus groups from home and potentially provide three to four times more feedback than traditional focus groups. Any type of visual or audio stimuli can be tested, including static images, print and radio advertisements, television commercials or product demonstration videos. For more information visit www.valientsolutions.com/
automotive.html.
Seg-men-tos first to target Hispanic consumers
Rockville, Md., research firm EurekaFacts has released Seg-men-tos, a demographic segmentation system created with the goal of allowing users to know Hispanic consumer markets in detail. Hispanic demographic data sets that are loaded to a workbook, customer profiling services, direct marketing lists, market reports and custom surveys are some of the forms in which the Seg-men-tos system is delivered.
Developed from a sample of 150,000 Hispanic households, Seg-men-tos provides demographic and lifestyle information on the more than 12 million households that make this segment. The segmentation system features nine segment groups. Each segment ranges from two to five million people with similar characteristics, such as language preferences, affluence, geographic region, cultural heritage and life stage.
Seg-men-tos is modeled after popular segment-clustering systems such as Claritas’ PRIZM and ESRI’s Community Tapestry. It provides reports, charts and maps using the effective who, what, where and how sequence to analyze behavioral profiles, lifestyle correlations, market potential, target concentration and media preferences.
Redlands, Calif., geographic mapping software company ESRI has agreed to provide population projections to make the segmentation system more effective. For more information visit www.hispanicsegmentos.com.
E-Rewards and iModerate offer real-time online qualitative probing
Dallas research firm e-Rewards Inc. has launched a new service to enable real-time qualitative probing of online survey respondents. The service, Hybrid Interviewing, is designed to allow researchers to gain insights by engaging individual respondents in real-time, professionally-moderated, online interview sessions powered by Denver research company iModerate.
These sessions occur at a pre-determined point in the survey in an instant messenger-type environment and help clients complete the research story by adding qualitative insight to quantitative data. For more information visit www.e-rewards.com.
Mintel Oxygen breathes new life into understanding market trends
Chicago research company Mintel has debuted Mintel Oxygen, a new online platform for its market research reports which is designed to give clients in-depth market analysis and forward-looking predictions.
Based on market data, analysis and consumer research and focusing on trends, consumer attitudes and business opportunities, it covers everything from food and drink to personal care to financial services. Beyond this, Mintel Oxygen offers features such as What’s Hot and Fast Forward Trends. These highlight the most pressing issues in a category, offering opinions on what the future holds and how businesses can succeed. For more information visit http://oxygen.mintel.com.
BrandIndex Service enters U.S market
Palo Alto, Calif., research company YouGovPolimetrix has launched the commercial brand reputation monitoring service BrandIndex in the U.S. The service is a daily measure of public perception of more than 1,000 consumer brands across 41 industry sectors, measured on a seven-point profile: general impression, buzz, quality, value, corporate reputation, customer satisfaction and whether respondents would recommend the brand to a friend. The average of these scores, excluding buzz, is what makes up the total BrandIndex score, while individually they are each an underlying indicator of a key component of a brand’s health.
BrandIndex can be used to identify emerging trends, enhance customer loyalty and quality improvements, and monitor the impact of news events, communications and marketing campaigns, new product launches and price changes on any given brand (and how a consumer will feel about it). For more information visit www.polimetrix.com.
Ipsos Canada strengthens Producers’ Perspectives panels
Winnipeg research company Ipsos Canada has unveiled Producers’ Perspectives – The Ipsos Canadian AgriForum, a new proprietary online panel currently consisting of over 1,500 Canadian farmers. This new market research tool is intended to help organizations in both the private or public sectors gather the opinions of Canada’s agricultural producers quicker and in a more cost-effective way.
Producers’ Perspectives members have been recruited by Ipsos and have agreed to participate in ongoing research on a variety of topics. All farm operation types found in Canada are represented within the membership of the Producers’ Perspectives AgriForum.
Producers’ Perspectives - The Ipsos Canadian AgriForum is an online community that uses Ipsos’ custom and proprietary Interactive Forum software.
The Producers’ Perspectives AgriForum is the second online panel initiative undertaken by the Ipsos Agribusiness, Food and Animal Health practice. The practice has also developed a new proprietary panel consisting of over 1,700 veterinarians in North America. For more information visit www.ipsos.ca/reid/agrifood/.
Kantar Media Research debuts BrandVibe, adds to IntelliQuest
Kantar Media Research (KMR), Austin, Texas, has introduced BrandVibe, a new syndicated study for business-to-business (B2B) technology marketers. It is designed so that technology marketers can use the tool to measure their brand’s relative vitality among product category competitors in the B2B marketplace. BrandVibe is fielded biannually within the IntelliQuest Business Study. It measures over 60 technology brands across eight categories that include desktop PCs, notebook PCs, handhelds, servers, operating systems, printers, networking products and telecommunication products. The product is intended to provide insight into the purchase intentions and media preferences among technology buyers in U.S.
Within each technology category, the BrandVibe methodology classifies each potential customer’s relationship with the brand. The four classifications are awareness (buyers who are aware the brand exists and that the manufacturer makes the product), suitability (buyers who are aware of the brand and do not automatically exclude it), acceptance (buyers who indicate that they plan to buy the product in the next year) and connected (buyers who fall into highest level of brand affinity). Each brand is then assigned a V-Score, which reflects a relative measure of the brand’s vitality among all brands measured in that technology category. The brand’s V-Score reveals the extent to which a brand converts potential customers to ever higher levels of brand affinity, uncovering the strengths of emerging brands and the weaknesses of market leaders within the category.
Additionally, marketers who subscribe to BrandVibe can see how their brand’s V-Score and classification levels stack up against the competition across over 100 pre-selected targets encompassing key demographics, business types and media behavior. For more information visit www.kmr-group.com/brandvibe.
Briefly
New York-based The Nielsen Company has launched Nielsen PreView, a business-to-business research service providing its members with business and marketing insights. Nielsen PreView will draw upon Nielsen’s marketing and media information sources to create original, multidisciplinary studies that address research interests and concerns voiced by members on PreView’s Web site. For more information visit www.nielsenpreview.com.
Separately, Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, has announced the full release of VideoCensus, a syndicated online video measurement service that combines patented panel and server research methodologies. For more information visit www.nielsen-online.com.
Redlands, Calif., geographic mapping software company ESRI has added new datasets to Business Analyst Online, ESRI’s Web-based business analysis tool, designed to enable professionals in commercial real estate, retail, economic development, urban planning and public safety organizations to conduct comprehensive market analyses with data reports and imagery. For more information visit www.esri.com.
The American Rental Association (ARA), Moline, Ill., has released the 2007 State of the Equipment Rental Industry market research report on the North American rental industry. ARA teamed with Lexington, Mass., consulting firm Global Insight Inc. for the third time to produce the report. For more information visit www.ararental.org.
New York research company Arbitron Inc. has implemented diary enhancements that are intended to improve response rates for hard-to-reach demographics. In all continuously-measured markets, Arbitron will offer a second chance to respondents in households who initially agree to participate but fail to return any diaries for the week they were selected. The second-chance diary system will include only those households that return no diaries. For more information visit www.arbitron.com.
Denver-based ingather research has opened a new “reality” focus group research facility designed to offer clients a more natural and realistic environment to conduct research. Reality focus group facilities are each configured differently to meet client needs. Some rooms include a living room, conference room, full kitchen, contemporary and library offices, dining room, wet bar and youth features. The new Denver facility is equipped with Wi-Fi; DirectTV; HDTVs for playback; DVD, digital audio, cassette and VHS recordings; and videoconferencing. For more information visit www.ingatherresearch.com.
Mondo Research, Los Angeles, has opened a new focus group facility in downtown Los Angeles, in the South Park area. The facility features an urban loft environment and is located near the Staples Center and Nokia Theater. For more information visit www.mondoresearch.com.