Services

Market Segmentation and Trend Tracking

Which segment of the complex consumer market are you reaching? How can you expand your market? Mind/Share can provide demographic breakdowns on just who your consumer is. Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, we’ll tell you how your current customers perceive your products and how you can expand your reach.

What are consumers thinking? How do they fill their days? Before you can market to consumers you need to understand them. Our research and analysis will answer your questions to provide you with everything from the big picture to a small snapshot of what goes on in your consumers' worlds.

We can monitor emerging tastes and desires of key customer segments in order to forecast new products or styles.  Let your managers "see" what consumers in their target market are choosing from week to week without leaving their desks.

Style Testing

Collect valuable data on consumers' changing preferences early in the design cycle. Get quick and early feedback on new design options prior to shipping samples or rolling out new products. Test reactions to sketches, prototypes, or finished products - from the very people who are in your target market.

Brand Vision

Products are purchased because of what they mean, not because of what they do. A fundamental challenge for marketers is to develop and communicate a consistent, desirable image to a specified target market using multiple executions and a variety of media formats. Currently the tools used to assess brand meaning are surprisingly rudimentary; at best a set of prototype concepts may be presented in a series of focus groups. This procedure is costly and unreliable. Brand Vision is a new approach to concept development that:

1. Provides rapid-response feedback from actual consumers early in the branding process.
2. Leverages the highly visual nature of this process (e.g., involving logos, package designs, storyboards)
3. develops a lexicon of imagery that can be applied efficiently and economically across product categories and brands.

Brand Vision is an online, visually oriented research tool that defines and tracks brand meaning. The methodology incorporates both qualitative and quantitative approaches to define a brand's meaning in the minds of current and prospective customers. These meanings can be compared to those perceived by brand managers, merchandisers and other value-chain participants.

By providing in-depth understanding of the brand concept as it currently exists in the minds of consumers and by comparing how these perceptions do or do not accord with desired brand positioning, we are able to pinpoint the gaps between the desired position and customers' perceptions. This provides a powerful springboard for developing the creative platform, refining brand positioning strategies and evaluating the efficacy of marketing initiatives. Once the brand concept is well understood and elements and the marketing approach are in development, Brand Vision can be used to test specific creative options.

One focus of this research tool is the identification of underlying brand or product concepts that can be translated into a set of consistent visual executions. This holistic perspective enables the creation of coherent marketing campaigns that feature consistent concept meanings across individual elements of the marketing effort. The emphasis on visual associations yields a powerful tracking system to assist in developing a lexicon of imagery that can be used for multiple products and brands in multiple markets. A visual versus verbal system also ameliorates the translation problems typically encountered in cross-cultural marketing research.