Today we delivered a large PowerPoint deck to a major technology solution provider in the retail industry detailing everything they wanted to know about a certain topic based on exhaustive primary (including two different surveys involving over a thousand qualified respondents) and secondary research. Unfortunately, that’s all we can tell you. And that’s the downside of doing commissioned research of a confidential and proprietary nature. Hundreds of hours of work and nobody gets to see it, except, of course, the client. We sign NDAs, typically, and we’re sworn to secrecy. This must be what it feels like to work for the CIA or the FBI. We have completed almost a dozen commissioned research projects over the past year, for companies on both the solution provider and industry practitioner sides of the fence, from venture-backed startups to multi-billion dollar publicly traded corporations, in industries that include retail, hospitality (restaurants and hotels) and healthcare IT. Some of the deliverables have been used to make company acquisition decisions (as in the case of a restaurant solution), some of the deliverables have been used to guide product development roadmaps, customer targeting and marketing strategy, and brand repositioning.
With two more custom research projects currently in progress, and several more on the horizon, the time was right to add some new project management resources to the team. With that, we’re pleased to announce, as a first step, the appointment of Debbie Carson, formerly of FCB (Foote, Cone & Belding) Global, which is owned by Interpublic Group and ranks as one of the world’s largest advertising agency networks, to the role of Director of Commissioned Research at Starfleet Media. We’re delighted to have Debbie on board and look forward to her contributions to the successful completion of many more custom research projects, none of which we can talk about.