Custom Market Research

You face tough decisions every day. Grunwald Associates gives you the power of sophisticated consumer market research tools so you can make the best choices. Let us help you with your most difficult challenges, including pricing, product line configuration, brand positioning, and choice of business alliance partners. Our approach is consultative: we’ll work closely with you to identify the most cost effective approach to address your business needs.

We make it easy for you

Instead of throwing complex deliverables or dense unrefined data at our clients, we’re oriented towards usefulness and simplicity. Our advanced research tools allow us to provide key insights in a highly visual and easy to understand format.

Expertise

We offer a unique combination of expertise in state of the art consumer market research tools along with a deep knowledge of the interplay between the youth/family, new media, and education markets. In addition, we have extensive experience in other market segments, especially research among executives and hard to reach populations.

All of our key team members have had operational responsibility including P&L. As a result, our research deliverables usually include ‘take aways’ and guidance on how to act on the insights from our findings. For more information on what sets us apart, click here.

Quantitative Market Research

We employ a multitude of data collection techniques including online surveys, telephone interviews (CATI), mixed methods (e.g., telephone to online), intercepts and even mail surveys on occasion.

Some of the analytical tools we use include:

• Derived Importance
• Brand and Correspondence Mapping
• Gap Analysis
• Conjoint Analysis
• Choice Modeling
• Regression Analysis
• Factor Analysis
• Other Types of Multivariate Analysis

Qualitative Research

Our qualitative research is often used early in planning and design processes, to test product concepts, to test usability, and for similar purposes. We conduct focus groups, individual interviews and usability labs to obtain rich feedback on product concepts, designs, and marketing messages. We also offer qualitative research in order to generate concrete guidance on, and validation of, existing prototype services and products. Our usability studies can include both group and/or individual interviews, and often have unique elements when we conduct them for clients.

How Our Advanced Market Research Tools Can Help You

Don’t Leave Money on the Table – Price Your Products with Precision

In the current economic climate, you can’t afford to price a product or service based on your ’gut.’ We use a special kind of “choice” survey to simulate the decision process for educators, in order to help you select the optimal price for your product or service. The main deliverable for our discrete choice studies is a proprietary interactive software tool that will allow you to explore “what if?” scenarios and create demand forecasts from your desktops – all in real time. Price sensitivity, optimal pricing, revenue forecasts, and market share all can be forecast depending on your needs.

This kind of simulation yields the best picture of how price affects your customer’s buying decision. Rather than simply asking preferences in a vacuum, we expose buyers to a series of more realistic choice scenarios involving price and other dynamic variables. This design acknowledges the dynamic nature of decision-making, and allows us to evaluate the interaction of different product capabilities and various price levels.

Maximize Demand and Profitable Revenue with the Right Product Features

Choice based surveys offer a powerful tool to separate ‘must have’ from the ‘nice to have’ features of a product. Respondents are exposed to a variety of products scenarios in which features and other product elements are varied within a carefully-crafted experimental design. By understanding consumer choice patterns and trade-offs, we can a find the real value for each product feature or element. With this understanding, we can identify the optimum product configuration and identify feature bundling opportunities. (Of course, understanding the features that are most likely to trigger a purchase decision can also be vital to creating effective marketing communications.)

We typically deliver a ‘what if’ tool that allows our clients to understand the effect on demand when features are added or removed from the product.

Optimize Your Product Portfolio

One key challenge is maximizing market reach while minimizing cannibalization within a product or service portfolio. We offer a variety of tools to help you identify the most powerful mix of products or services. For example, TURF analysis (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency) is used to identify the product portfolio that will attract the largest number buyers with the fewest products. This tool also allows us to calculate the incremental reach (if any) provided by adding additional products to a portfolio, thereby identifying the optimal product mix.

Discreet choice is another technique we us to identify an optimal product line based on customer tradeoffs in a realistic competitive context.

Discover Your Brand’s Strengths and Liabilities, Measure Perception Drivers… and Find out How Your Brand Stacks up Against the Competition

Brand and reputation are more important than ever. Our branding and positioning studies use advanced analytical tools to provide you with simple and easy to understand deliverables, along with recommendations. We’ve found that simply asking respondents directly can often yield misleading and non-actionable findings. Instead, we rely on advanced statistical techniques such as ‘Derived Importance’ to identify the true drivers of brand perceptions. These drivers and attributes can then be ranked by importance into an index. We use this data and other variables to create highly visual brand ‘maps’ that will help you understand your positioning in relationship to the competition.

Identify and Understand the Customer Segments with the Strongest Potential

We understand that not all customers are created equal. Our custom segmentation approaches help you identify the most and least profitable customer groups based on a number of key psychographic, attitudinal, behavioral, and demographic dimensions. Our findings will help you focus your product development and marketing efforts on the most promising customers, and avoid market segments that may not be very profitable. Our segmentation solutions are always actionable, with highly visual “placemats” that help bring the segments to life for Marketing and Product Development stakeholders.

Choose the Right Business Alliance Partners

Our tools can reduce the guesswork involved in business development. With our research, you can identify the partner whose brand will provide the most market lift in combination with your brand. We use the same simulation survey tool described above for price optimization, along with a range of other methods. Using a simulation, we treat different combinations of brands as a key variable to provide you with guidance on your business development decisions.