Brand Positioning

Issue: This client needed to better position its brand in a relatively undifferentiated market. Each competitor, including our client, tended to claim the same benefits, and left customers to simply evaluate alternatives based on price.

Approach: We recruited key decision-makers and influencers in the category, with a mix of brand users and defectors, to evaluate brands in the competitive set. Given the difficulty non-marketers have articulating their impressions of brand equity, we armed respondents with a toolbox of metaphors that enabled them to truly communicate their feelings about each brand.

Deliverable: Connect Insights created a visual dictionary that illustrated our client’s brand equity and relative position in the market. We juxtaposed this with an image of the “ideal” brand position as related by respondents, and gave our client a clear roadmap of steps they needed to take to achieve this position.

Key Opinion Leaders

Issue: This medical device manufacturer wanted to speak with surgeons across the United States who influence other physicians and residents. This target group was narrowly defined and from a particularly difficult to recruit surgical specialty.

Approach: Only a few dozen respondents across the country are considered to be thought leaders in this category, making it inefficient and uneconomical to travel to visit these respondents. Connect Insights recruited these specialists to participate in a webinar-based interview, which allowed us to share a video of a new medical device and how it they could use it to potentially decrease surgical time and increase patient safety.

The webinar methodolgy allows for digital video recording of each interview, client access to listen in to each interview, client access to the moderator for additional probing and a toll-free number for the participants to call. Additionally, the moderator can make notes on a presentation and verify with the respondent, to summarize key learning during each interview.

Deliverable: Key learning helped validate the key benefits of the medical device and drove the communications strategy of how surgeons in this specialty would expect to be educated on the device, and how they would influence others.

Global Reach

Issue: A global client wanted to better understand the requirements and unmet needs of hotel housekeeping staff in eight countries across the globe.

Approach: Connect Insights coordinated with a network of moderators in different countries to brief them on the project, recruit Directors of Housekeeping and Housekeepers from major hotel chains such as Hilton, Marriott, Accor and International Hotels Group, and conduct interviews among these key stakeholders. We made these interviews available via audio recording in the native language, and transcribed the interviews to make them available for English-speakers.

Deliverable: Learning led to a wealth of new product opportunities to address areas of dissatisfaction that had previously been unrecognized.

Customer Advisory Council

Issue: A healthcare client wanted to gather keen insights from key customers in multiple countries, in addition to creating a ‘win-win’ atmosphere where these key customers could learn from each other as well.

Approach: Connect Insights helped create an Advisory Council of key customers in the US, UK, and Canada, and has been facilitating annual in-person meetings among key customers for years. Advisory Council members serve a two-year term and new members are recruited to take the place of departing members. Working with an internal project team and key subject matter experts, Connect Insights crafts an interactive two-day agenda, with engaging exercises and learning sessions that help the client learn more about their customers’ needs, and customers are able to learn from each other. In addition to the annual in-person meetings, ad hoc interviews and webinars are used to address interim needs.

Deliverable: Findings from these sessions drive strategic corporate decisions regarding new product development, communications, customer management practices and more.