White Papers
Innovation - Who Cares? 
With all the buzz about
innovation – in products, in marketing, in media – you might think it was important to
consumers. You also might be wrong. Our work across categories - from fashion to fast food to entertainment to furniture to
home appliances - suggests innovation is not nearly as important to consumers as many
marketers think.
By Carol Phillips
Managing Brand Value Strengthens Business Health
Most companies closely measure their business across multiple dimensions, from productivity to return on investment to cash flow. Brand measurement systems help companies direct their efforts and resources to areas with the greatest brand and business impact. By Judy Hopelain
On Track: The Next Generation of Brand Tracking Offers Improved Business Performance and Eases Budget Concerns
Senior management is placing increased pressure and scrutiny on marketers to justify their budgets, and is continually looking for bottom-line benefit building investments. By delving into the next generation of brand tracking, marketers can improve both business performance and ease senior management's concerns. By Judy Hopelain
Featured Case: Giving a Wrench to Big Box Stores
How does the little guy beat the BIG BAD BOX STORE? With a smarter positioning of course. Our approach combined a customer survey, in-depth laddering interviews with 60 of our clients best customers and a n=1200 market research survey -- all efficiently executed online. Together, these studies provided all the insights needed to provide our client with a comprehensive brand strategy for winning.
Means-End Decision-Making Research Using StrEAM Interviewing
StrEAM™, a new online method for conducting and analyzing laddering interviews, makes it possible to quantitatively identify the hierarchy of product features, functional benefits and emotional benefits that drive brand differentiation and choice.
Brand Strategy Toolkit 
MBA students at Notre Dame needed it. Clients asked for it. So we created it. This brief presentation provides the basic frameworks for creating a brand strategy: brand audit and brand inventory, brand equity platform, target insights, positioning, personality, brand experience and more. Need to define a new brand? Revitalize an existing one? This 30-page presentation provides a perfect starting point.
Partnership for Food Safety Education
A summary of our recent investigation of a new logo for the Partnership for Food Safety Education, a not-for-profit that strives to educate the public about safe food handling practices. This report features hybrid research techniques, a combination of an online survey of over 1600 food preparers, 4 online focus groups and 24 in-store interviews.
Understanding
Cross-Channel Shopping Behavior Using Hybrid
Research Techniques
The presentation describes how a series
of four online studies combining qualitative
and quantitative research techniques helped
JC Penney better understand the behavior
and expectations of customers who shop online,
in stores and in catalogs. The information
was used to help JCP focus its merchandising
and communications strategies for this important
shopper group.
Branding
From the Inside Out: How to Approach Brand
Strategy, Brand Measurement and the Management
of Brands as Assets
Used in the MBA Brand Strategy
class at the University of Notre Dame, this
paper provides a general description of
the process of conducting a brand audit
and developing a brand strategy.
Marketing
is Changing. Are You Ready?
The basis for Phillips' presentation
at the October 2005 ARF "Future of
Advertising" Conference, this paper
exams how marketing strategies must evolve
with evolving products, services, and the
technologies used to access them.
Articles and Presentations
Get the Best Out of Millennials by Tweaking Habits, Advertising Age, by Carol Phillips, February 4, 2008
Millennials: Clued in or Clueless?, Advertising Age, by Carol Phillips, November, 19, 2007
In
Search of True Brand Equity Metrics: All
Market Share Ain’t Created Equal, Journal of Advertising Research, by Carol Phillips and Thomas J. Reyonolds, June 2005
Online Group Messaging: A Technological Spin on Focus Groups, AMA Marketing News, featuring Carol Phillips, September, 15, 2007
Hybrid Approcah Tends to Yield More Insight , AMA Marketing News, by Carol Phillips and Linda Stegeman, April, 1, 2005
