Market Research

At Strategic Marketing & Research, Inc., (SMARI), we begin the research process by designing a unique research program for each client. Every client has specialized needs and off-the-shelf research programs do not adequately provide the marketing and customer information that leads to excellence. SMARI can combine myriad methodologies into a cohesive whole.

Advertising Effectiveness

Clients of Strategic Marketing & Research, Inc., (SMARI) use market research to pre-test messages and then to evaluate advertising effectiveness once the messages are transmitted. They want to evaluate their return on advertising investment and ensure money is spent wisely.

Branding Research

Branding research determines how brand name and image are performing in the marketplace. Companies with a clear understanding of awareness and perception of their products and services can make adjustments to their offerings and marketing strategies, which puts them in a better position to compete and grow.

Conversion Research

Conversion research has become more challenging as people increasingly have used the Internet as a travel information resource. Potential visitors may see or hear a destination’s ad in traditional media such as TV, outdoor, newspaper, magazines, or radio and then proceed to interact with the destination’s website. This clouds efforts at discerning the effectiveness of any of these forums. SMARI has worked with clients to place a pop-up survey on such websites to gather a random sample of users during advertising campaigns. These people are combined with traditional respondents to form the sample for the conversion study.

Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer loyalty assessment stems from the unfortunate fact that customer satisfaction does not necessarily ensure repeat purchases. With this type of research, SMARI measures the levels of attachment to a product or service. This helps companies to make changes that can turn happy customers into loyal customers.

Customer Value Assessment

Customer value assessment supplies customers’ judgments on product and service offerings relative to those of rival products. This information effectively allows a business to not only retain current customers (satisfaction prompted), but to also acquire new ones (value prompted).

Employee Satisfaction Studies

SMARI designs this type of research to measure the effectiveness of internal management practices, policies, and values from the perspective of the people most affected by them: employees. Internal processes can support or hinder employee performance and loyalty.  Improvements in these areas can result in higher quality products and services.

Market Assessment

Successful marketing requires differentiating one’s product or service from competitors. This positioning activity can take the form of offering uniqueness, desirability, or believability.  Through this type of research, clients can discern specific features to promote to establish their products in a distinctive way in the minds of prospective customers.

Market Segmentation

Defining and targeting market segments is a way to leverage knowledge about customers and prospects, and thus more efficiently direct marketing efforts. By examining market segmentation dynamics, SMARI clients can enjoy an edge and feel confident they have a handle on who and where their customers and prospects are and how to go about successfully marketing to them.

New Product Validation

Introducing goods and services derived from the customer’s perspective will increase the odds of success for new products.  SMARI believes qualitative techniques such as focus groups are a good way to begin gauging the reaction to new product concepts or changes to current ones. This can be followed up by quantitative research to provide additional information about product features, package testing, price sensitivity, etc.