Marketing Sciences Center

 
Translating business issues into the best methodologies of advanced marketing sciences to generate the most helpful insights for TNS clients
 

The Marketing Sciences Center at TNS offers much more than standard statistical technologies. We listen carefully to our clients and customize our approaches to address business needs and research questions. Our team of over 20 marketing scientists in North America alone has experience in a variety of industries and business problems, along with diverse academic disciplines, enabling us to apply the best methodologies during each phase of research, and ultimately generating the most helpful insights for TNS clients.

Our value lies in our ability to assist you with the creative translation between business issues and advanced marketing sciences. This is a dialogue that flows both ways, starting with your business needs to which our methods and models are targeted, and ending with the business implications for you of our efforts.

Our Process—Enhancing Outcomes

The Marketing Sciences Center enhances outcomes at every phase of the marketing research process:

  • Present a compelling statistical story to clients, enabling data-driven decision-making
  • Conduct classic or cutting-edge analyses, as appropriate
  • Enhance the data's usefulness through weighting and data fusion where necessary
  • Guide data acquisition, using surveys and other public or client-provided sources
  • Recommend and plan to implement best practices in statistical methodologies
  • Consult directly with clients to identify business issues and formulate research questions from them

Our Expertise—Addressing a Broad Range of Complex Business Needs

Product Optimization and Pricing
Learn how customers make decisions by analyzing the tradeoffs they make. Determine the optimal mix of product features through fixed and adaptive discrete choice modeling or conjoint analysis, including Bayesian and mixture modeling approaches for individual feature importances. Optimize product line-ups with genetic algorithms. Estimate price sensitivity and maximize profit or market share with correct pricing or feature mix.

Market Segmentation
Get a comprehensive view of the market customer base with advanced segmentation techniques, including multi-domain and latent class. Identify the best target market segments for your offerings. Calculate new opportunities for customer acquisition and upsell. Profile and prioritize segments. Learn how to locate and classify potential customers for further study and effective marketing with classification techniques. Enable better customer targeting using data integration to score a customer database.

Brand Positioning
Measure brand equity in the marketplace, including emotional and rational perceptions, and learn how to more effectively reposition your brand to improve market share.

Key Driver Analysis
Determine how to effectively impact the business metrics that matter most. Prioritize tactical actions and evaluate the results of future strategic plans using key driver approaches, ranging in complexity from various forms of robust regression to structural equation modeling with latent classes.

Marketing Accountability
Quantify the impact of past marketing programs on sales or revenues through Marketing Mix Modeling, using econometric and time series methods. Learn how to improve and extend your existing programs for improved future market results, with an optimal mix of marketing activities. When the extensive historic data needed for Marketing Mix Modeling is not available, evaluate the impact of the marketing mix on market shares using ad hoc surveys based on share of wallet modeling.

Simulation and Forecasting
Evaluate specific planned actions and entire strategic plans, and optimize these plans using user-friendly, customized decision support tools. Demonstrate the effects of changes in perception using interactive brand maps. Show how loyalty changes with changes in customer ratings using a key driver simulator. Predict effects of marketing mix changes with time-series forecasts. Determine and evaluate optimal product feature, pricing, and marketing combinations.