••• retailing
Raise your ShopperIQ
Solution suite sets out to measure and predict shopper behavior
Decision Insight, Kansas City, Mo., has debuted ShopperIQ, a suite of solutions to test and measure what shoppers will do at retail and predict the impact of strategies where decisions are made: in the store.
ShopperIQ is designed to allow manufacturers and retailers to test what-if scenarios; create the appropriate context to test alternatives; understand the whys behind the results; optimize communication with consumers; and save time and money over live in-store testing.
The ShopperIQ solutions include Arrangement, to identify the planogram that grows the category and improves shopability; Assortment, to optimize sales with the right assortment on the shelf; Pricing, to measure the impact of varying pricing strategies, for the client and the competition; Packaging, to evaluate and optimize packaging strategies that impact performance on the shelf; Merchandising, to test and optimize alternative in-store communications and merchandising strategies; New Product Development, to maximize new-product potential in its competitive context; Shopper Decision Tree, to understand the shopper decision hierarchy at the point of purchase; and Visualization, to support sales teams with visual, data-driven stories. ShopperIQ is powered by Decision Insight’s virtual shopping platform, SimuShop.
www.decisioninsight.com
••• social media research
Flash-polling from Crowdvi.be
Peanut Labs debuts tool for quick insights from social media
San Francisco research company Peanut Labs has launched Crowdvi.be, a product designed to target a unique population of social media respondents and provide insight into time-sensitive topics. Crowdvi.be enables organizations to access ready-to-poll respondents in a variety of vertical markets by embedding short questionnaires into a network of social media and gaming sites across the U.S, including Facebook. This capability is intended to allow users to launch their quick polls and collect respondent data from a sample pool of over 50 million consumers within minutes; the average time to begin receiving responses is 40 seconds.
With 24-hour access, users can launch quick polls at any time to an existing network demographic. The current version allows users to target respondents based on age, gender and income, with plans to add ethnicity, personal interests and geographic location.
Offering exclusive support for multiple-choice questions, Peanut Labs’ Crowdvi.be tool enables users to include a minimum of two pre-written answers and a maximum of seven pre-written answers for respondents to choose from and supports both single-select and multi-select questions. It also allows images and video.
Crowdvi.be is currently available in beta mode and offers a platform for concept testing; campaign feedback; product opinions; brand perceptions; customer satisfaction; social media scoring; and predictive modeling. Users can register for a complimentary personal account with limited access to polling capabilities.
www.crowdvi.be
••• online research
Real-time tracking online
Dial tester technology takes to the Web
Portland, Ore., research technology company Dialsmith has released Perception Analyzer Online, an interactive survey platform that aims to track moment-to-moment opinion spikes online. With Perception Analyzer Online, standard and interactive question formats are paired with tracking tools, such as second-by-second video evaluation. By continuously moving Perception Analyzer Online’s slider technology while a video plays, a respondent’s opinion can be measured to the second, allowing researchers to graphically see how the respondent was feeling throughout the video – pinpointing specific people, words, phrases, images and scenes that cause spikes.
Perception Analyzer Online is designed for researching political messaging; political and consumer ad research; TV pilot and movie trailer testing; product packaging, design and pricing evaluation; and brand messaging.
www.dialsmith.com
••• mobile interviewing
IPads app suite for focus groups
Real Time Chatter uses tablet technology to streamline feedback
San Francisco research company Chatter Inc. has released a suite of iPad apps for focus groups. Dubbed Real Time Chatter, the apps are designed to consolidate focus group feedback for clients. Using Real Time Chatter, each focus group respondent is given an iPad on which they complete an exercise, such as evaluating a new product concept or creating a brand collage. Their completed work streams live to both the moderator and the client via a secure Web interface. A real-time report then compiles respondent feedback for all to view. Clients can sort responses by age, gender, segment, ethnicity or location. Projects are archived permanently for review and comparison.
www.chatterinc.com
••• segmentation research
The DigitaLink between demographics and consumption
New solution segments consumers by digital media engagement
Chicago research company SymphonyIRI has released DigitaLink, a segmentation solution designed to provide insight into how quickly consumers are embracing digital media; which demographic groups are most interested in near-term engagement; and what strategies best engage these audiences. DigitaLink uses SymphonyIRI’s consumer network panel MarketPulse’s research and analytic capabilities to segment shoppers into unique profiles.
DigitaLink has identified five distinct groups of Internet users, all of whom are active online in one way or another but access the Web in different ways, have different comfort levels with technology and various attitudes about how much they want to engage with it and the role they want the technology to play in their lives. The five segments are as follows:
Show Me the Money – These shoppers focus on using digital technology to save money by frequently searching for and downloading coupons online. They may occasionally write product reviews or post comments on blogs.
Digitize Me! – These shoppers have incorporated digital media across the board in their lives and participate in various online activities. They have a higher tendency of interacting with companies and brands on social networks and are also more willing to post their opinions online.
Technophobes – This group rarely searches online for product information or coupons or interacts on blogs, leaving most online activity to e-mail.
Socializers – Socializers use the Internet primarily as a means of communication versus a shopping resource.
Wired for Work – Most consumers who fall in this segment own a smartphone and are driven by digital media, but use the technology primarily for work-related tasks.
www.symphonyiri.com
••• ad research
Data on DOOH
Ad-tracking technology analyzes across digital out-of-home networks
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., media services company rVue Inc. has launched its ad verification technology, which aims to provide real-time analytics across digital out-of-home (DOOH) networks. RVue’s metadata initiative was developed to bring real-time accountability to advertisers’ DOOH campaigns and enable buyers to review and optimize live campaigns across networks.
The verification technology embeds a beacon into video files that is compatible across all platforms and is accessible to most DOOH networks. The technology is built using a scalable cloud-computing architecture and is designed to deliver daily reporting on 100+ million DOOH ad-playback events to rVue’s partners.
RVue’s ad-tracking technology complies with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s VAST standards for reporting digital video advertising.
www.rvue.com
••• retailing
Getting the full Experience
Program uses mobile technology to track physical shoppers
Claris Solutions, a Tulsa, Okla., retail performance consultancy, has partnered with Palo Alto, Calif., data analytics firm Euclid Elements to debut the Claris-Euclid Store Experience Program, intended to improve store performance through visitor-based information and expert analytics. The program aims to turn shopper data into performance improvements.
The Claris-Euclid Store Experience Program is built around the use of mobile sensors that map shopper traffic patterns in retail spaces. These sensors sense Wi-Fi signals on smartphones, allowing Claris consultants to understand how shoppers move through a physical store environment.
www.claris-solutions.com
••• diy research
Quick look at QuickTake updates
SSI adds U.S. voters, auto translation, mobile capabilities and question capacity
Shelton, Conn., research company SSI has enhanced its QuickTake do-it-yourself research solution. QuickTake is designed to help users conduct surveys at any time with target audiences across the Americas, Europe and Asia. Added QuickTake features include automatic translations, which allows users to program surveys and present them to respondents in up to eight different languages. SSI has also expanded QuickTake’s question capacity, giving users the option of asking up to 20 closed- or open-ended questions. Additionally, QuickTake can automatically render surveys to fit mobile devices. QuickTake also has added U.S. registered voters to its audience selection criteria.
Other new features focus on simplifying and improving the user experience. QuickTake offers a streamlined login process and can automatically save surveys during the design process so users can stop and come back later to finish questionnaires with no risk of losing information. Users now also have the option of setting their own quotas or having the system handle that for them, balancing age and gender by region.
Additionally, QuickTake provides greater flexibility in creating questions, enabling users to employ skip logic as well as randomize answers. For surveys needing to incorporate visual elements, users now can upload images.
www.quicktake.com
••• quantitative research
Using research to combat survey fatigue
New toolset analyzes respondent behavior and survey success
Research software companies SurveyGizmo, Boulder, Colo., and ClickTale, Ramat Gan, Israel, have partnered to create an analytics toolset that includes survey heat maps, mouse tracking and respondent recordings to deliver insight into the decision-making process as individuals take surveys. The aim is to allow businesses to create more engaging surveys, improve survey completion rates and capture better data.
The toolset uses ClickTale’s customer experience analytics technology to allow SurveyGizmo customers to better understand their respondents’ survey-taking experience. ClickTale’s Form Analytics suite identifies specific survey questions that prompt users to leave the survey; time spent answering each question; and questions that tend to cause problems for respondents. A comprehensive real-time project dashboard provides drill-down metrics including geography-based data and customizable conversion goals that track results.
www.surveygizmo.com
••• survey software
SSI Web revs up to V8
Survey software platform sees several updates
Orem, Utah, research company Sawtooth Software has released version 8 of SSI Web, its online/CAPI survey software platform. Users can install SSI Web V8 alongside an existing SSI Web installation and continue using both versions independently. Version 8 includes several new features, including looping to repeat a series of questions for each member in a list of items; semantic differential questions to provide a way to ask rating questions with paired end-points; database support; crosstabs; CBC improvements, including support for more than 30 attributes and increased attribute count for conditional relationships; and export improvements, including batch exporting, recoding list values, filtering and more.
www.sawtoothsoftware.com/products/ssiweb
••• customer experience
Capella for a clear VoC
Maritz platform aims to make CEM data actionable
Maritz Research, St. Louis, has released Capella, its customer experience measurement and action platform designed to offer a comprehensive approach to designing, measuring and managing large-scale customer experience programs from sample design to action planning.
Capella incorporates four tools to manage and track actions that have the highest impact on the customer experience: helping frontline employees; resolving customer issues; identifying what makes customers angry; and taking steps to improve issues that make customers angry.
Capella’s user interface and customizable dashboards aim to enable businesses to answer essential questions and take action upon the results via performance reports, hot alerts (real-time issues that need to be addressed quickly), employee dashboards and priority dashboards.
www.maritzresearch.com/capella-news
••• research software
Choice modeling for free
Decision Analyst rolls out open-source software
Arlington, Texas research company Decision Analyst Inc. has developed free choice-modeling software. Called ChoiceModelR, the software is an open-source software package written in the R language. ChoiceModelR includes the following features: dependent variable may be either discrete (nominal or ordinal) or share (continuous between zero and one); constraints may be imposed on model parameters; number of choice observations per decision maker (e.g., respondent) may vary; and number of choice alternatives per choice observation may vary. The software can be downloaded from Decision Analyst’s Web site.
www.decisionanalyst.com
••• political research
Verifying voter history
Companies team up to debut Voter Insider
Washington, D.C., data services company Catalist and iModerate Research Technologies, Denver, have partnered to launch Voter Insider, an online solution for political, advocacy and civic engagement research that is designed to verify online research respondents.
Respondents frequently misrepresent their voting history and behaviors. Voter Insider matches Catalist’s proprietary database of voter information to respondent profiles from three of the largest providers of online research respondents in the U.S. This offering blends Catalist’s method of respondent validation with online research services from iModerate.
Voter Insider provides access to five million verified respondents and lets pollsters and other researchers select a target audience that closely represents the voting population based on their documented vote history and modeling scores.
The solution is available in three packages: a hybrid (qual-quant) package for ad testing; a qualitative package; and a custom package of a la carte research options.
www.voterinsider.com
••• mobile research
For when you can’t Be-There
Mobile app puts ethnography in respondents’ hands
U.K. research company SPA Future Thinking has launched Be-There, a mobile ethnography tool designed to bridge the gap between a consumer’s actual and reported behavior. Be-There uses video, audio, photos, text and barcodes in-situ, which are then combined via a downloadable app to build a complete picture of the consumer and their experiences. By eliminating an in-person researcher and interview time constraints, the tool aims to allow participants to provide feedback at key moments.
Once uploaded to an online platform, the project team can interact with participants in real time. Analysis then allows content to be tagged, themed and distilled into insights and a multimedia summary output.
www.spafuturethinking.com
••• Briefly
Research companies Millward Brown, New York, and Affectiva, Waltham, Mass., have partnered to integrate Affectiva’s facial expression analysis technology (Affdex) with Millward Brown’s Link ad copy-evaluation and optimization solution. The solution is designed to test emotional responses to ads by detecting facial and head movements through a Webcam and classifying them into emotional states.
www.millwardbrown.com
The CASRO Institute for Research Quality (CIRQ) division of the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO), Port Jefferson, N.Y., has awarded certification to Lisle, Ill., research company Kantar Operations North America for compliance to the ISO 20252 standard for market, opinion and social research. Processes outlined in ISO 20252 are designed to produce transparent, consistent, well-documented and error-free methods of conducting and managing research projects.
www.casro.org
New York research company WorldOne has launched its List Match tool on its client portal WorldOne LIVE. List Match is designed to instantly run list matches at no cost. In addition to displaying the number of matching records, the tool allows clients to set the incidence rate and provides an estimated number of completed surveys broken down by specialty.
www.worldone.com
Opinionmeter International, a San Leandro, Calif., research company, has released its TouchPoint Mobile survey app, which introduces white-labeling capabilities for research organizations interested in maintaining consistent branding awareness.
www.opinionmeter.com
New York research company StrategyOne has added a mobile community app to its PluggedIN Communities offering, allowing users to access the PluggedIN community platform from their smartphones. The app is based on HTML5.
www.pluggedinco.com
Prosper Mobile Insights, a Worthington, Ohio, research company, has debuted its ProsperChina Tablet App and InsightCenter to give marketers a quarterly look at the Chinese market through the eyes of the Chinese consumer. The solution is available in both English and Mandarin.
www.prospermobile.com
Data management companies TruSignal, St. Cloud, Minn., and BlueKai, Cupertino, Calif., have expanded their partnership to provide online advertisers a way to target high-value consumers across several product and service categories, including automotive insurance, life insurance, telecommunications, financial products and education. TruSignal’s Ideal Audiences will be publicly available for purchase on the BlueKai Exchange.
www.tru-signal.com
Amadeus Consulting, Boulder, Colo., and Lynx Research Consulting, Boise, Idaho, have partnered to create CommentLynx, a free smartphone app for iOS and Android 2.0+, designed to gather live feedback from customers to improve customer service.
www.lynxresearch.biz
Stockholm, Sweden, research company Cint has debuted Cint Access, a DIY product intended to allow users to deploy online surveys to individuals that match their exact profiling requirements in under seven minutes. Cint Access is linked to OpinionHUB, which contains over seven million people connected to brands in 50+ countries. Cint project managers are available to assist.
www.cint.com
Google has built Screenwise, a panel of a few thousand people to learn more about how everyday people use the Internet. Screenwise is designed to help Google understand Web usage better, such as what times of day people browse, how long they stay on Web sites and what types of sites are popular. Google has selected Menlo Park, Calif., research company Knowledge Networks as its panel management partner.
www.screenwisepanel.com
Austin, Texas, research software company Bazaarvoice and Buddy Media, New York, have partnered to launch What’s Popular Right Now, a social application designed to help customers integrate Bazaarvoice customer-generated content into their Buddy Media-powered brand pages and social media campaigns. The most popular products or services – based on customer conversations such as ratings, reviews, comments and shares – are then promoted within the app, encouraging consumers to scroll through and interact with the brand’s Bazaarvoice content and share their experiences with their friends and across their online networks.
www.bazaarvoice.com
Baltimore advertising technology company Videology has partnered with research companies I-Behavior, Louisville, Colo., and Kantar Shopcom, Wilton, Conn., to combine Kantar Shopcom’s consumer packaged goods purchase behavior insight with I-Behavior’s database matching capabilities for online behavioral targeting. The solution aims to reach users based on their demographic makeup or in-store activities and target and measure actual offline purchases from online video advertising.
www.videologygroup.com
Reston, Va., research company comScore Inc. has launched its Ad Metrix service in Brazil.
www.comscore.com
Civicom Marketing Research Services, Greenwich, Conn., has announced a four-tiered pricing scheme for Civicom Chatterbox Multimedia Board, its solution designed to conduct online bulletin board focus groups and forums: CBox Free, CBox Pro, CBox Basic and Custom CBox.
www.civi.com
IModerate Research Technologies, Denver, has implemented ThoughtPath, an approach to qualitative research that revolves around three cognitive theories – identity theory, perception theory and phenomenology. ThoughtPath is designed to allow iModerate’s qualitative researchers to better understand consumers’ inherent thought processes and how they make decisions.
www.imoderate.com
Paris research company Ipsos has launched online panels in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as part of its Rewarding Panel project.
www.rewardingpanel.com
Bangalore, India, research company Borderless Access has launched panels in Indonesia and Turkey.
www.borderlessaccess.com
Ebony Marketing Research Systems Inc., New York, has debuted five ethnic panels: the African-American panel; the Hispanic panel; the Asian panel; the Islamic/Muslim panel; and the faith-based panel.
www.ebonymktg.com
Reston, Va., research company comScore Inc. has released its 2012 Mobile Future in Focus report. The report highlights insights primarily from mobile markets in the U.S, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, U.K., Japan and Canada.
www.comscore.com
Santa Monica, Calif., research report company IBISWorld has released its Auto Customization Shops in the US report.
www.ibisworld.com
Hudson, Ohio, research company Hedges & Co. has announced new part-specific automotive research reports available for instant download at its online market research store. The online store offers the company’s new part-specific BuyerZoom and BrandZoom research reports.
www.hedgescompany.com
EPM Communications Inc., New York, has released How Mobile Devices Are Changing The Way Americans Shop, a report that details what a good mobile shopping experience is and reveals what consumers expect from mobile payment and checkout systems. The study is available for $750, including free supplementary updates.
EPM has also published All About Women Consumers for 2012. The report is available for $299 as a single-user PDF or print edition.
www.epmcom.com
Kinesis Survey Technologies LLC, Austin, Texas, has published a white paper, titled Future-Proofing Online Panels: A Multimode, Multisource Approach. The white paper focuses on changes within the market research industry in terms of panel management strategy and implementation.
www.kinesissurvey.com/resources/whitepapers