Solutions Marketing - What's new this year?
Solutions Marketing - What's new this year?
Solutions News No.18 - A brief article incorporating my Christmas best wishes, a summary of my most intriguing new client projects this year and my planned changes for the coming year
Tony Nix ASA, MBA Director, Solutions Marketing & Consulting
Merry Christmas - Happy New Year
First I would like to wish all my clients and contacts a very happy and peaceful Christmas and a successful and rewarding New Year in 2015. We value our relationships with our clients and reinforce our continuing committment to 'more insight for less cost' in Market research, business analysis and marketing strategy
What's new now?
I intend to publish a few more newsletters, but instead of issuing the Newsletters to all and sundry, I will describe the content and provide a link to my website for those interested in following up on the detail newsletter. Thus the emailed newsletter will never be more than a short 1-1.5 pager.
Over the Christmas period I will update the web site to make it more mobile responsive, reduce the copy and update the case studies. I will also incorporate a link with an associate who is an expert in the 'Digital & Social Media' space and another with an expert in sophisticated dashboard generation.
What was new in the last 12 months?
A special welcome for three new clients, namely UBS (Switzerland's largest bank and the world's largest manager of private assets), secondly Peter Bruckner Barrister together with Kelvin Solari (instructing) Solicitors. and Alkira Homes.
The first UBS project involved a quantitative study of ALDI Supermarkets performance amongst n=600 Aldi shoppers across 237 stores existing since the the pre-existing study 3.5 years earlier. Surprisingly, these same store results showed no significant changes, proving that Aldi's significant growth in that period had come almost entirely from the added 90-100 new stores. The two studies also produced significant insights as to category importance and performance and the behaviour and spending pattern of shoppers.
The second UBS study was a quantitative study of n=403 high quality leather handbag buyers across Australia, designed to measure the Brand Strength of a particular Australian brand in relation to its competitors. To implement this study we drew on world's best practise and in particular from the Young & Rubicam's Brand Asset Valuator methodology. In this I was greatly assisted by advice from David McCallum, Managing Partner Gordon & McCallum (designers of superior research methodologies) and formerly head of Nielsen Ad Hoc Research in Asia. It does appear that Y&R have been measuring brand strength/vitality (via differentiation & relevance) and Brand Stature (via consumer esteem and knowledge) using the same 48 image attributes for many years (Source: BAV Consulting web-site, a sister party to Y&R, both owned by WPP). It also appears that these attributes were largely derived from the initial 42 trait attributes developed by Jennifer Aaker in 1997, to measure brand personality. (Source: "Dimensions of Brand Personality. "Journal of Marketing Research, 34, 347-356).
Now many of these attributes are now out-of-date and some have developed different meanings depending on the circumstances, but I assume Y&R retains them for the benefit of comparison with historical findings. I think my approach is superior measuring brand strength with successively harder methods and then determining the underlying reasons for the strength or weakness of the brand via eighteen 7 point bi-polar scales. UBS management and their key investors were very happy with the results. To read my paper on this methodology click on or paste to your browser the following link. www.solutionsmarketing.com.au and then click on the 'Solutions News' article entitled 'A unique methodology to measure a brands relative strength or weakness'
The task required for the legal team was to produce an 'Expert Witness Report', showing the profits forgone over a 6 year period, due to the brand failing because of poor quality handling & storage by the contract manufacturer. The brand in question included a range of nine skin care beauty products all incorporating the Noni berry, used by many Polynesians because of its numerous health benefits. By combining my knowledge of marketing these type of products (for Colgate-Palmolive), with my market research knowlege (accessing Euromonitor actual market data), and my finance and accounting background as Finance Director for Colgate palmolive (to produce a complex profitability model in Excel). I was able to accurately estimate the profitability. Accurate, because most of the assumptions are supported by historical market data or underpinned by my professional experience.
The Alkira Homes project was a short, sharp strategy planning session to clearly identify the target customer, understand thir needs, differentiate them from their competitors, understand the SWOT factors and the essence of the brand resulting in a clear positioning and advertising tag line. In addition the 7-p performance factors were defined and evaluated, and future strategy and action plans mapped out. The resut is a new website with updated marketing and promotion plans is underway.
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Finally, it is gratifying to know that UBS, one of the worlds most successful investment companies can rely on our research findings to add market and consumer insights to a number of their investment reports. Likewise my Legal team client is confident of their success in court early next year, due to the strength of my Expert Witness Report analysis and the veracity of its sources. Evidence of our continuing committment to 'more insight for less cost'. And Alkira Homes are confident enough to redesign their brand offer to maximise their sales success.