Market realities: the flop rate in the food trade is at 90% or higher, and not coming down over the years. Professor Jones and others have proven that only a minority of advertising campaigns trigger consumer off-take, meaning that most advertising money is not being spent profitably. This means that help from consumer research is particularly needed at the beginning and at the end of the marketing process. Our contribution to clients' success is broadly defined as:
With our innovative methods user potential can already be reliably determined in early development stages, and at costs significantly below those of e.g. conventional test market simulations.
Since the CHANCE® Criterion reliably determines for each and every test person whether or not he or she would be a trialist/ regular user of the test brand or not, 20-30 test persons normally are enough for a statistically significant differentiation between hit and flop level.
A little anecdote: A manufacturer of shoes asks 2 different research companies A+B to determine whether there is promising potential for his products in black Africa. Key findings and conclusions:
A. There is huge potential because almost nobody wears shoes yet
B. There is virtually no potential because almost nobody wears shoes
Obviously, this little story is exaggerated. Yet it reflects the fact that research results may be ambiguous.
Since the CHANCE® Criterion yields a ‘potential? yes/no’ decision person by person, the likelihood of ambiguous results is minimised.
There are good sources of knowledge about current buyers and users of brands and products. What normally is lacking: information, both qualitative and quantitative, about new or additional user potential. Definitions normally are vague, derived from findings like brands used before. However, with a view to future brand growth, information about new user potential should ideally be even better than that about current users. Therefore, our methods focus on determining new user potential, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. And descriptive criteria are such that targeting of the additional user potential becomes as easy and precise as reaching current users.
Group discussions and explorations are the most widely used research techniques. Their value in the idea finding phase is undisputed. However, they are constantly misused by applying them as if they were quantitative methods. Per definition they are not open to validation. The CHANCE® Criterion is dichotomous, and therefore open for validation.
We try to document all implemented studies and their role in brand marketing. This ensures constant control of our work, and a constant learning process. Thus we have an ever growing number of case studies about small and big brands, from smaller and big(ger) companies, showing small, big and some dramatically big contributions of our work to brand success in the market. The case studies cover a variety of markets and a number of different countries.
Professor Heil and his team of marketing scientists have checked the CHANCE® Criterion on its marketing science foundations. They have submitted the paper ‘The CHANCE® Approach: A New and Simple Method to Predict Success or Failure of New Products’ to the Journal of Marketing Research for publication. (Copies are available upon request.)
All of our consultants have occupied leading positions in well-known companies. They held responsibilty for developing and implementing marketing plans, and for strategic advice to national and international companies. Together with the unique tgmr TARGET GROUP methods this experience provides the basis for our consultancy success.