Corporate Reputation can be defined as the sum of all perceptions and expectations that relevant stakeholders have about a company in relation to that specific stakeholder’s own agenda.

Reputation is not necessarily informed by any actual knowledge about, communication from, or interaction with the company – and can be held, communicated, transmitted, and transferred by stakeholders who are outside the company’s control or knowledge.

Reputation Management involves monitoring and managing perceptions so as to achieve advocacy, permission, and acceptance amongst your key stakeholder groups.

The Harris Interactive Reputation Management solution identifies key areas of focus for your business to effectively manage your corporate reputation through:

• Identifying, prioritizing, and profiling reputation stakeholders
• Identifying issues of importance amongst key stakeholders
• Developing a unique set of reputation attributes and drivers specific to your organization
• Analytic modeling by stakeholder, geographic region, business line, etc.
• Competitive and peer company benchmarking
• Evaluating communication, channel, and program impact
• Delivering implications, recommendations, and strategic planning to optimize your reputation

The total relationship you have with your customers is beyond the aggregation of all experiences they have with you.  Periodic, high-level relationship evaluation is critical to keep you well-informed in making data-driven decisions to improve performance.  These research evaluations should include the relevant business domains within which your organization has the appetite and ability to drive change.  Additionally, only those parts of your organization with the willingness and potential for change should be measured as part of holistic relationship performance research.

Harris/Decima Relationship Assessment tests your own hypotheses regarding organizational strengths and weaknesses to deliver clear, precise learning.  We help you answer critical business questions like:

• What parts of the relationship have the greatest impact on our customers?
• Where does strong performance give us competitive advantages?
• Which unmet needs are the priorities for resource allocation to drive improvements?
• What processes are inconsistent and create dissatisfaction among the customer base?
• Which types of experiences and touchpoint channels have the greatest impact on customer behaviours?

Linkage to business performance metrics and action planning workshops are two proprietary ways in which Harris/Decima will help your organization bring the findings of your relationship assessment programs to life.  We apply your results to findings from profitability analyses, performance consistency evaluations, and root cause analyses to deliver holistic and diagnostic brand insight.

Relationship strategies and stakeholder needs-based solutions are critical factors in creating brand differentiation and a strong competitive advantage.  One key stakeholder group that needs to be addressed in these assessments is your employees.

Harris/Decima Employee Engagement research identifies employee attitudes and actions that are in agreement with the overall company mission statement and objectives, as well as those that are not.  Additionally, our programs measure the degree of perceived “fit” employees feel with your organization’s culture and structural hierarchy.

Our research scientists deliver beyond the guidance produced by data to directly suggest and apply corporate intervention strategies and process changes.  We set up workshops with your employees to develop strategies for making them more active consumers of your brand identity.  The end result is a more precise alignment between your company goals and the perceptions and behaviors employees exude in accordance with that mission.

Customer defection directly impacts the need for new customer acquisition based on one simple reality:  It is more time- and cost-effective to manage existing relationships than it is to create new ones.

The ability to pinpoint which customers are at risk for defection is extremely powerful, but it is only the first step.  Once identified, it is imperative to know what to do to prevent their defection – by determining the cause of their discontent and what corrective actions will repair the relationship.

Harris/Decima Customer Churn and Winback analysis provides you with answers to such critical business questions as:

• Which customers are leaving us for competitors?
• How much impact do they represent to our business?
• Why are they leaving?
• What preventative measures can we take?
• Once defected, are there any corrective measures that will win them back?
• How do we determine the most effective means of winning premiere customers back?

Our Customer Churn and Winback research will identify at-risk customers that represent significant profit potential to your organization, while pinpointing specific pain points amongst both your general and at-risk base.  These strategic insights will allow you to re-focus your business priorities on correcting areas of discontent amongst your consumers to manage the longevity of their relationship with your organization and make the best use of your limited resources

Dynamic markets, shifting customer needs and competitive pressures have all dramatically increased the need to optimally deliver at each and every touchpoint in order to remain top of mind amongst consumers.

Attaining a competitive advantage within specific interactions with your customers is done in one of two ways:

• Through Better Delivery:  Providing similar products or services better than competitors
• Through True Differentiation:  Adapting and evolving slightly ahead of your target market to deliver something different than your competitors

Harris/Decima Touchpoint Experience research provides a clear indication of what your customers want and need from your organization, specific to any particular interaction, and will help you map your service delivery processes to optimize performance.

By revealing the trade-off between different interaction components, you will see what your customers expect and how to meet or exceed those expectations.  We will ensure that the questions being asked are the ones that will directly lead to your business improvement:

• Are we measuring the right things?
• Are we missing any important experiential elements in our review?
• Has the market evolved while our research program has grown stagnant?
• Why do we get the same scores month after month?
• How do we apply this data to organizational change?

Packaging

Packaging, which is often your ultimate touch point with consumers, is an increasingly important and strategic way to manage your brand portfolio.

Harris/Decima offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to help you meet this challenge by:

• Evaluating the health of your current packaging
• Gaining  contextual intelligence in the field
• Laying the foundation for a holistic package design creative brief
• Assessing the  graphics, labels and structures of new package designs

Our collection of solutions blend leading edge online virtual shelf tools and in-store and central location methodologies with quantitative and qualitative research techniques – providing the critical point-in-time insights necessary to ensure that your packaging delivers in market.

Pricing

Whether part of a larger investigation of market potential or as a stand-alone issue, Harris/Decima can guide you in determining the optimal price for a product.   We utilize methodologies such as choice-based conjoint analyses and simulate the effects of various prices on the share of choice achieved by a given product, while also including more traditional monadic price testing experiments and tools such as the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter.

Line Optimization

Does your organization meet the individual needs of consumers by offering numerous varieties of your products?  Are you struggling to determine which varieties to keep, add or delete?  When you face these challenges, the Harris/Decima Line Optimization Test (LOT) can help you predict the effects of various alternatives in a product line on the net consumer reach within the target group.  LOT provides the size and composition of the optimum product line and the effects of line extensions on the entire product range.

Harris/Decima's Concept Screening solutions help you to quickly and cost-effectively test a large number of new product ideas and identify which few concepts are worthy of further evaluation and development.  We answer such questions as:

• Which early-stage new product ideas represent your best opportunities for success?
• Do these highest-priority concepts actually show market potential, or are they merely the best of a weak set of concepts?
• What is the driving interest for a specific concept?
• Who do the new product ideas appeal to?
• What might be done to improve a moderately-performing concept?

Our concept research experts work seamlessly with researchers who specialize in your industry to provide high level consultation and rigorous quality control in getting correct answers quickly.  Once research is completed, we evaluate results in two ways:

1. All of the concepts against each other, in order to prioritize the ideas for further testing and development.
2. All of the concepts against a benchmark (either a current product concept or category norms), in order to get a sense of the rough, early market potential for the best new product ideas.

We also provide individual concept scorecards, which reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each new product idea and can often times guide next-stage concept refinement research.

The world of communications has changed dramatically over the past decade:  Multi-media campaigns are now the norm, digital marketing has advanced rapidly, and the power of word-of-mouth and social media has become unparalleled.

These changes bring new challenges to managing your communications programs and diagnosing the influence of touchpoints on your target audience.  Harris Interactive’s Touchpoint Modelling solutions can help you answer such critical questions as:

• How effective was my marketing in changing attitudes of my brand?
• How have attitudes of my brand been influenced by social media and word-of-mouth?
• Which media within my marketing program were the most effective?
• Which elements of the campaign were responsible for specific changes in perceptions?

Our proprietary modelling precisely measures the effect on brand attitudes resulting from in-market consumer experience with one or more brand touchpoints.  The resultant data is therefore able to:

• Reveal the overall effect of the marketing program
• Distinguish between the contribution of different touchpoints
• Indicate which elements have contributed most significantly to your brand’s success
• Highlight the relative return on investment for each element of the campaign, in terms of shifts in brand attitudes, when used in conjunction with advertising expenditure data

Our modelling approach involves weighting respondent data to account for any existing affinity with your brand so that we are able to detect how well exposure to your marketing has strengthened brand engagement.