Can utilities develop new products to drive opportunities with small businesses?

Magazines and newspapers are buzzing with articles on energy-conserving products for consumers, such as electric vehicles, solar power options, and zoned temperature controls. But how can utilities take advantage of the buzz? Portland General Electric (PGE) wanted to find out.

PGE theorized that ductless heat pumps can offer constant comfort to small businesses without the cost or hassle of a major HVAC overhaul.

PGE engaged Hansa GCR to conduct research with the small business market—ranging from a tattoo shop to a winery to a dog daycare to a printing company. Research explored their current needs, their perceptions of the ductless heat pump product, and the hurdles they perceived in adoption.

By Wayne Marks, President, Hansa|GCR

There are a gaggle of ways to look at brand and define what a brand is. We at Hansa like to think of a brand as a gestalt. No matter what elements we put forward as the ingredients of a brand, the whole will be more than the sum of the parts. This fact explains why there are so many different ways of looking at brands – we are implicitly trying to understand this gestalt.

Beyond the gestalt, we also advocate that a brand is much more than a logo, tagline, or the position a company communicates to the market. While these are important, customers and prospects judge the company and its products by far more than that. They don’t experience just the brand communicated in messaging; they experience all ways in which they touch the product and company. They form their thoughts and feelings about the company based on this total experience. The experience is the brand. This total experience shapes the customer mind space occupied by the brand.The mind space occupied by the brand should not be accidental. It needs to be purposeful. This requires the company to be clear about what it wants the brand to stand for. What the brand stands for needs to set the company apart and provide the customer with a reason to buy its products rather than a competitor’s.

By Dan Llanes, Director of Analytics, Hansa GCR

If you’ve been reading along or perhaps attending webinars we’ve been taking a look at the many benefits of Adaptive CBC (Choice-based Conjoint). Now it’s time to turn our attention to the types of results we can generate with this technique. The Adaptive CBC questionnaire contains three major areas, the Build Your Own (BYO) section, the screener and the choice tournament. From these areas we can learn the following from a purely descriptive standpoint:

• BYO: How often levels were included as part of respondents’ preferred concept
• Unacceptables: How often levels were considered unacceptable
• Must-Haves: How often levels were must-haves
• Screeners: How many products were screened into the consideration set
• Choice Tournament: How often levels were included in the “winning” concept

These are all important questions, but they only begin to scratch the surface of what is possible with Adaptive CBC data. With the use of a simulator tool, conjoint data comes alive.

By Wayne Marks, President, Hansa GCR

In a prior Thoughticle™, Refreshing the Brand: Focusing on Key Brand Elements,” we described Hansa’s proprietary Brand RJVNTR™ process and the brand elements that need to be addressed to create your brand promise. These elements are summarized in the following exhibit.

By Wayne Marks, President, Hansa|GCR

Is you brand current and impactful? Does it need to be refreshed? Where would you plot yourself on the following chart? Is your brand still on it is initial growth curve? Is it starting to level off? Perhaps decline? Should the brand be refreshed and readied for its next evolution?

To answer the above questions, consider the following:

By Ed Jaffe, Customer Intelligence Consultant, Hansa Marketing Services

Often, when one hears about business analytics, big firms (Amazon, IBM, Google) come to mind. However, analytics aren’t just for the big guys – small companies can also reap the benefits of business analytics to increase revenues and improve the bottom line.

Last year, I consulted with a small Consumer Product Goods (CPG) company. This two year old company’s primary sales channel was the internet, and they had received about 13,500 orders. The owners came to me knowing they had a retention problem (92% of customers ordered two times or less); however, because they had never analyzed their data, they were unaware of

How much money are you spending on tracking customer satisfaction? Consider not just the costs for research, but internal costs of personnel managing research plus all the stakeholders who receive the tracking results or who are otherwise involved in the process. Also consider whether there are opportunity costs – in other words, if you re-deployed these monies to other purposes what could you do with them that might be of value? Perhaps you are spending $100,000. Or, might you even be spending millions like some companies do with massive global customer satisfaction tracking programs. This can be a significant investment for any enterprise and as with any investment, we must ask… how can we get a return?

I visited an Apple Store the other day and waited outside till they opened.  When I entered, the entire Apple crew was arrayed from front to back along each side of the store and facing the front.  They all clapped when the doors were opened.  Clapped for me and the other customers who entered.  Hokey?  Maybe.  Effective? 

If customers didn’t like Starbucks coffee, they wouldn’t go to their stores.  Period.  Of course the Starbucks customer experience goes quite a ways beyond the latte.

One might even argue that objective evaluation of the coffee is not really done by consumers. The cache of the Starbucks brand and being a Starbucks customer brings all sorts of nuances to likeability of the product per se.

But the coffee has to be good enough to at least pass a threshold of consumer-perceived quality. Indeed, when Starbucks broke into the market, the coffee was decidedly different, save for a few American roasters like Peets and the Italian baristas that are the Starbucks heritage.

Your product or service is enjoying success in North America, and you have a clear notion of the next stage of maturity in that market. But you may want to consider how it will play on an international stage. To begin thinking about international research, ask yourself these questions. How will you start to develop an international research road map? And more importantly, what do you need to know when you arrive at the end of the road?