Market Research Matters

"If you start to notice that you and your competitors are both losing customers and you don't know to whom?meaning it's not to each other or to the usual suspects?that's another indicator that something radical is happening in your industry. "

"If your business knows the drivers of its success, then you can determine where to direct focus and from where to base peripheral vision."

"To make the process more than academic, the research/strategy team needs to pose issues in such a way as to facilitate decision making about whether new strategies or business designs are needed."

"The effective marriage of research-based insight and creative marketing judgment is a formula for success."

"Although the criteria for choosing customers to target may vary, a company should focus on satisfying those who will be more profitable to the firm and those who will be willing to be loyal."

"In business, splatter vision means never becoming so focused that you expect your challenge to come from a specific direction."

"When handled correctly, category management achieves efficient consumer response through four key strategies: efficient replenishment, efficient promotion, efficient assortment, and efficient new forms of introduction."

"Studies consistently show a relationship between employee satisfaction and the corporate bottom line."

"If the migration of retail business from brick-and-mortar to virtual stores represent the first phase of e-commerce, the future of perfect on-line competition threatens to be the second phase."

"Monitoring actual results, establishing causes, and taking corrective action are indispensable planning/implementation activities, more difficult in practice than academic books on the subject of planning seem to imply."