Our Philosophy

The applications for multivariate analysis and modelling in market research projects are widespread. The business benefits achievable via these powerful techniques include the ability to:

• Segment the market into groups with similar attitudes, needs, preferences or tastes and make this information actionable across all areas of the marketing mix – product optimisation, pricing, channels and promotional activity.
  
  
• Assess the underlying drivers of behaviour and attitude in the markets and understand how these interact and impact on key metrics such as product consumption, loyalty, satisfaction.
  
  
• Understand how groups other than customers drive market place behaviour (employees, channels and other key audiences) and assess the strength, direction and impact of their behaviour.
  
  
• Simulate how market metrics change in response to specific changes in observable or latent factors in the market and how these relationships differ across brands, product categories and decision maker segments.
  
  
• Map how a new product, service, brand or technology is positioned across various dimension vis-à-vis its competitors
  
  
• Prioritise investment and expenditure, to maximise loyalty, satisfaction, volume, revenue or profit.
  
  
• Confirm or improve upon models of market-place behaviour developed via in-depth interviews and focus groups.
  
  
• Conduct very economic piloting of market activity using Experimental Designs, to optimise its impact and overall ROI.
  
  
• In summary, make marketing a profit centre instead of a cost centre:
  • Increase: Acquisition of high value customers, Effectiveness of marketing activity, Cross-selling to existing customers, Customer loyalty/retention, Advocacy of your brand, Average Revenue per User, Use of profitable channels, Tailoring of service to specific segments, Synergy from Research and other Customer data, ROI
    
  • Reduce: Over-emphasis on low-value or unprofitable customers and channels, Churn of high value customers, Acquisition costs, Negative-advocacy of brand, Direct Marketing overheads, Reliance on poor quality or incomplete customer data and Budget Wastage
    
  • Optimise: Product pricing, Profile and Positioning vis-à-vis competitors, Promotional Activity and Level of customisation to specific segments

Surprisingly, many research budgets fail to earmark that little bit of extra expenditure to capitalise on multivariate research techniques. This often arises through the lack of accessibility and understanding of the techniques that are available. The investment required to tap into some of the available techniques and associated benefits is often small in proportion to the overall cost of the project (set-up, fieldwork, project management, data processing etc.). Multivariate Analysis can often easily be accommodated through creating efficiencies in other parts of the process which do not add value. The most common sources of waste in market research projects include:

• Questionnaire space - Uneconomic use of available space, leading to longer interviews length and higher cost



• Sampling Frame and Recruitment criteria - low conversion rates adding to cost



• Reporting - over-reliance of “charting” all question responses without providing insight, leading to waste of executive time

This is not meant to be a criticism of the industry – we can probably all put our hand up to at least one of these in the past. However, it highlights a number of common inefficiencies which will be familiar to market research practitioners in all fields. It illustrates that building Multivariate Analysis into research proposals need not add significantly to the cost of project if inefficiencies such as these are designed out.

Use of Multivariate techniques provides a high net-return for both buyers and suppliers of research. Clients will get more insight in addressing their business issues and better ROI from Research, while suppliers will be able to differentiate themselves from their competitors and generate longer lasting relationships with their clients.

Finally, a common misconception about Multivariate Statistics in research is that it is too complicated and can be difficult to explain to clients. This largely results from the perceived “mystery” surrounding these techniques and the convoluted mathematical notation and Greek symbols used in white papers submitted to journals and other articles to express what are often simple concepts. This leaves most non-statisticians mortally in fear of statistics and encourages the practice of “leaving the clever bits to techies/academics”. Logit Research’s philosophy is to make these techniques and their business benefits more accessible to the marketing and market research communities, without baffling clients with mathematical formulae, acronyms or esoteric output, which require hours of (often unbudgeted) executive time to interpret.

When properly implemented, Multivariate Analysis greatly simplifies the reporting process, whilst at the sample time adding valuable insight to specific business and marketing problems. In other words, it allows the researcher to tell a very powerful story in simple terms, without clutter.

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