Marketing in Real Life

I love the Winter Olympics - from curling to hockey to freestyle skiing to the biathlon. And of course, I am always fascinated by the sponsors and the fees those sponsors pay to be involved. When we looked at the impact of Super Bowl ads on people's propensity to go online and learn more, big ticket sports advertising didn't seem worth it. But this week's research on the Olympics told a different story as not only were people aware of the sponsorships, they saw significant brand benefits (read more in the article at MediaPost ). The other interesting note was that many competing brands were also getting lifted by sponsorships. Maybe its a side effect of the fact that Verizon and AT&T (for example) are so embedded in one another's commercials but certainly everyone is benefiting from perceived Olympic affiliation .

Today on the Research Brief Blog , Genesys, with Greenfield Online and Datamonitor/Ovum analysts, estimated that U.S. companies lose an estimated $83 billion each year due to defections and abandoned purchases as a direct result of a poor experience. More and more often customer experiences are not a face to face or even face to phone interaction. Often times it is web-based or through social media. Making sure these interactions are in alignment with your brand has never been more important. And it has never more important to measure social media within your customer satisfaction and loyalty research programs. When conducting customer satisfaction research we have always spent a lot of time putting the customer experience in context of the brand and making sure the two are aligned. More and more this involves understanding alignment and use of social media from both a marketing perspective (what most companies are doing) and a customer service perspective (what smart service organizat...

Welcome to this month's issue of 1 topic, 5 blogs. Todays topic is DIY surveys. Links to my fellow bloggers Bernie Malinoff, Joel Rubinson, Annie Petit and Brandon Bertelsen can be found below. Since the day I joined the market research industry a decade ago (and much longer I assume), researchers have been yearning for wider use of market research within organizations and the proverbial "seat at the table." And while I fully understand and recognize the concerns that MR professionals have about Do IT Yourself surveys like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang, these tools present the much sought after opportunity for research to be more widely adopted and valued in large companies and more widely used in smaller organizations. Why are these tools attractive to clients? One of the driving forces I have seen behind the use of DIY surveys are frustrations with internal and external research organizations. So before shuddering at the thought of someone who has not been trained as a re...

Here in Boston it has become tough to digest a Super Bowl week without our beloved Patriots involved. Given my love for the food and music of New Orleans and the fact that CMB's President, Anne Bailey Berman is from Louisiana, I'll be wearing black and gold when big event arrives. But what are other people thinking and tweeting about as the "big event" approaches? Using Voxtrot Opinion (a cool way to monitor and analyze online conversations from our friends at Crimson Hexagon) I looked at what people in the Twitterverse (Twitter users) are talking about this week. The first finding, "the big event" isn't necessarily the game itself. In fact, just 38% of tweets related to the game and the two teams involved (24% in favor of the Saints, 14% in favor of the Colts). So what else is on the table? From discussions of who is (Focus on the Family featuring Tim Tebow) and who isn't (Pepsi) advertising this year to planning and attending parties to questions...