we searched for the words stracciatella and pizza

Is Stracciatella A Soup Or A Cheese? Formulating The Right Questions To Get The Right Answers

August 20, 2015
, , The Art of Research

Pizza Pizza!

A few weeks ago, a brand new artisan pizza place opened around the corner from our offices on Walnut Street. A review of their menu showed a delicious selection of pizzas using fresh ingredients – not your typical mozzarella – most of which were in Italian.

The consultants at The Melior Group are curious by nature and enjoy good pizza. So it probably isn’t a surprise to learn that we researched the heck out of the ingredients, and discovered a new word for many of us: “stracciatella,” which was presumed a cheese, since this was a pizza place.

Using our trusty friend Google, we typed “stracciatella” into the search bar…and received surprising results. The first entries listed were for SOUP – not cheese – or anything remotely related to pizza.

A Deeper Dive into the Deliciousness of Italian Food
Other kinds of people (you know who they are) might have stopped there and given up, but the consultants at Melior are not quitters…especially when it comes to pizza. We dove deeper into the results only to find various recipes for gelato and roman-style egg-drop soup (which looks delicious).

Using clever thinking, we searched for the words “stracciatella” and “pizza” together and we finally got the results we hypothesized… some delicious looking pizza! Much lower on the list was a recipe for a homemade stracciatella – a soft, fresh cheese. Ah ha! [It turns out the word is from the Italian “stracciare”, which means to tear or shred – think shredded cheese]. This new pizza place makes its own from scratch.

What Does Seemingly Obscure Cheese Have to Do with Melior?

This whole pizza cheese search exercise reminded us of why we do what we do for our clients: we are experts at asking the right questions to get the right answers from the right people. But we also are sufficiently flexible to change our research patterns when the information we uncover doesn’t exactly makes sense or meet our objectives. And we don’t stop until we find what we’re looking for.

If you learn anything from this week’s post, it’s that stracciatella is more than just a cheese and Meliorites will always take a deeper dive to get to the right answers.

We encourage readers to google their favorite recipes and then send their results to us for a taste test (all in good research, of course). Buon appetito!

About the Melior Group:
The Melior Group was founded in 1982 to bring the disciplines of marketing research to service industries. Today, Melior is one of the region’s leading research-based consulting firms, serving organizations in the non-profit, healthcare, government, leisure, tourism, financial services/ insurance, and education sectors.

For more information or to request a proposal, please contact The Melior Group at (215)-545-0054 or [email protected].

LInda McAleer named 2015 Brava Award Winner

Smart CEO Brava Awards Honor Linda McAleer

August 7, 2015
, , , , The Art of Research

We are so proud that our President, Linda McAleer, has been named a 2015 Brava Award Winner!

As part of their July/August issue, SmartCEO Magazine honors the region’s top female business leaders. The Brava Awards program honors female CEOs, nonprofit leaders and high impact executives who combine their irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit with a passion for giving back to the community. This year’s 40 CEO and executive winners collectively generate $626.5 million in annual revenue and employ more than 7,000 individuals in the Philadelphia area.

Each winner was asked to share her thoughts on what aspiring leaders should be thinking about today. Below are Linda’s thoughts on the current state of the workforce and the rise of a new type of consumer.

Workforces have changed and customers have changed… from a workforce perspective, we are looking at multigenerational workforces who have to work together and support each other to achieve their objectives. Managing a workforce that has… learned differently, that communicates differently, and that has different work styles and goals… takes a special kind of leader who can inspire and listen and adapt.

From a customer perspective, we are now looking at an often-invisible customer… someone who interacts with a product or brand via an electronic device much more often than in person. How, then, to deliver a customer service experience that allows these invisible customers to be loyal takes an accomplished leader that will think past the today and into the tomorrow.

“Brava winners possess hallmark qualities of successful leaders — vision, passion, compassion, dedication, perseverance. Each winner in this year’s class exhibits these qualities in all facets of her life, from running her business to tending to her family and donating time and resources to philanthropic initiatives,” says Jaime Nespor-Zawmon, president of SmartCEO Events.

Congratulations to Linda and all the female CEO and executive winners!

Linda McAleer with fellow Brava Award Winner, Dianne Semingson

Linda McAleer, left with fellow Brava Award winner, Dianne Semingson, right.

Linda McAleer with Sponsor Shechtman Marks Devor PCI at 2015 Brava Award Ceremony

Thank you to our sponsors, Shechtman Marks Devor PC! Chuck Shechtman, right, with Linda, middle, and Susanne Shuster, left.

For more information about Linda’s SmartCEO award click the links below:
Linda’s full winner profile:
Brava Winners Group Videos:

About the Melior Group:
The Melior Group was founded in 1982 to bring the disciplines of marketing research to service industries. Today, Melior is one of the region’s leading research-based consulting firms, serving organizations in the non-profit, healthcare, government, leisure, tourism, financial services/ insurance, and education sectors.

For more information or to request a proposal:
Please contact The Melior Group at (215)-545-0054 or [email protected].

Sometimes You Just Know. Or Do You?

July 9, 2015
, , , The Art of Research

Back in my newspaper reporting days, I wrote a lengthy, detail-packed Page One piece exploring the adequacy of changes in the nuclear power industry to mark the fifth anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident. The newspaper’s 30-person editorial staff did not include a fact-checker. So the next day when my editor received complimentary telephone calls from anti-nuclear activists and members of TMI’s public relations team, he told me: “You got it right!”

Because his intuition, informed by decades of experience with reader feedback, suggested:

  1. When both sides complained, his reporter probably got something – or many things – wrong.
  2. When only one side complained, it was 50-50: Did his reporter get something wrong or hit so close to home as to anger people on one side of the dispute?
  3. But when both sides were happy, that meant his reporter wrote a full and fair analysis.

Studies suggest that intuition alone – without supporting research – can produce accurate assessments, but only if the intuition is based on experiences that are representative of the current situation. My friends at The Melior Group and I encountered just that scenario during recent work with a mutual client. I was hired to analyze the client’s marketing communications; Melior, to do a demographic assessment and survey of target audiences.

Melior’s work began first but time and other constraints forced us to work more-or-less concurrently and independently. My analyses and recommendations were at least 90 percent cooked – I was well into my second draft – by the time Melior completed its work.

I opened Melior’s report with anticipation, not trepidation, because I expected what I found: The research findings supported my analyses on everything from brand promise and messaging to advertising strategy and PR tactics. Not because I’m some sort of boy genius (far too old and dimwitted for that) but because enough experience (30-plus years) and a modicum of intelligence can make one highly intuitive about certain things.

But here’s the kicker: Just like my editor, who thought the story he was printing was accurate but who still breathed a sigh of relief the next day, our client still needed Melior’s research findings. Heck, I needed them, too.

One, my recommendations carried a lot more weight when I could cite Melior’s findings to back them up. Research moved the conversation from “trust me” to “it’s just like I said.”

And two, well, at the risk of sounding all Donald Rumsfeldian: How do you know what you know intuitively is true?

You know?

Guest Writer Mark Eyerly is principal of Remarkable Communications LLC.

About the Author:
Mark is an exceptional strategist, problem solver, team builder and story teller who has led groups from three to 40 members in raising visibility and strengthening brand reputation for institutions in the corporate, higher education and philanthropic worlds.

The Soccer Field Sidelines: Ground Zero of Your School’s Brand, Part 1

June 11, 2015
, , , , , Education, The Art of Research

I have spent most weekends the last few years on the soccer field sidelines (or, depending on the season, lacrosse or basketball). In between my fervent prayers for rain (just enough to cancel the game but not ruin the weekend) or a tiny clap of thunder (no play for 30 minutes! everybody go home!), I find myself talking to other parents. I barely know these people, so we stick to what we have in common: kids of similar age, most of whom attend school.

For the uninitiated, let me back up a moment. These sports teams that I am referring to are not school teams. Rather, these teams that play their games on the weekends are community teams. The kids typically come from a variety of different schools…many of which, in my area, happen to be independent.

Personally, I love these conversations about schools. My marketing research instincts kick in, and I sit back and listen. It gets particularly interesting when a family says that they are thinking about switching schools for their child. All of the parents jump into the fray, and a lot of really tantalizing information gets bandied about. It’s hard to separate fact from fiction, but it sure is interesting! You feel like a school expert by the end of the game.

Word–of-mouth has always been something that schools need to be aware of and manage. Yet, while a lot of attention has been paid to the role of social media in revving up the word-of-mouth engine, I believe that in some communities, the sidelines are equally, if not more, powerful channels. Participation in community sports teams has exploded in recent years; in some communities, the vast majority of kids under age 14 – regardless of their athletic prowess (or even interest!) – take part in at least one community team sport. That means that parents of kids from myriad schools have a lot of time on their hands to sit on the sidelines and “watch” (wink wink) their kid play.

The upshot? Every weekend, your school is a topic of conversation. Your school’s name and reputation get kicked around and headed more than the soccer ball.

This chatter can’t help but have significant impact on a school’s brand, which, in turn, is directly correlated with enrollment (and other) success. When prospective independent school parents, for example, are asked in surveys how they first learned about a school, “word of mouth” is by far the leading answer.

Given the reality of idle talk, ever-growing opportunities to spread information, and the importance of such information on consideration of independent schools, what’s a school to do?

I think the answer involves both reactive and proactive steps, simultaneously.

  • On the reactive side, schools need to understand what kind of information/misinformation is being kicked around about them. What is the current reputation/brand? How did it get there? How widespread is the information – both that which is accurate, and that which is pure rumor? The Melior Group often conducts these kinds of studies for our clients that allow them to get a handle on fact from fiction.
  • At the same time, schools need to develop a longer term, proactive strategy for shaping their reputation/brand for the future. A school needs to craft intentional messages that communicate its strengths, and to make sure internal constituencies, i.e., current and recent past parents, alumni, faculty and staff, can – and want to – repeat those strengths on the soccer field sidelines. Here, we use both qualitative and quantitative research to understand which messages truly resonate with intended audiences.

Part 2 of this post is now available here, where I present my thoughts on the impact of interscholastic sports – that is, school-based teams playing other school teams – on school brand.

For more information on Melior’s work with independent and religiously-affiliated day schools, please visit our Education page or contact Elizabeth Cohen at [email protected] / 215-545-0054 ext 103 or Linda McAleer at  [email protected] / 215-545-0054 ext 104.

Alumni Pitfalls And Cleanup: Steps To Avoid Costly Mistakes.

May 14, 2015
, , , , Higher Education, The Art of Research

The Pitfalls Of Alumni Engagement 

Wait. What? There are pitfalls when alumni are engaged with their alma mater?

The utopian view is that university development/engagement offices are brimming with requests from alumni who want to be actively involved with their alma maters. Reality is a completely different story.

We Shudder To Think That Sometimes Alumni Can Hurt Rather Than Help

At a higher education conference I recently attended, and after talking to a few professionals, I noticed some interesting and similar stories were starting to emerge. It was pretty clear that some alumni who – at first – seemed eager to impart their wisdom and work with current students – had acted of their own accord with unintended consequences and damaging effects as a result.

  • A colleague talked about alumni who agree to advise groups, but who don’t make the time to meet with the students or take their roles as advisors seriously; leaving students ignored at exactly the time they expected assistance.
  • Volunteer alumni advisors were “helping” students by teaching them how to circumvent university risk management policies so they could still hold a previously unapproved event.
  • Despite efforts that a university was making to rebuild its brand and reputation and improve the quality of students admitted, well-intentioned alumni, remembering the “good old days” were inadvertently sabotaging the school’s efforts at recruiting events by perpetuating the old stereotypes (of a non-academic party atmosphere)… leaving students puzzled and administrators wondering how to bridge this gap.

Be Proactive To Mitigate Or Eliminate Their Mistakes In Advance

Of course, alumni are valuable to every university – they enhance small and large-scale development efforts and under the right circumstances can be great marketers for a university. BUT, as the examples above illustrate, alumni can be detrimental or counterproductive to efforts without proper oversight.

The good news is that there were a number of lessons that came from these situations that will allow a university to train, manage and monitor valuable alumni volunteers.

  • Attain buy-in on branding/re-branding efforts so alumni can be effective marketers
  • Train alumni volunteers and student advisors to encourage healthy student-alumni relationships and prevent risk management issues, have back-up plans in place.
  • Know your alumni and suggest the best engagement strategy for individuals
  • Use alumni engagement surveys and student surveys about their experience with Alumni as an excellent tool for learning – and monitoring – their shared experience
  • Redirect alumni efforts when things go sour, to help resolve a situation, but not lose the goodwill of the alum

Proactive university staff are looking to engage alumni in constructive ways and they’re learning how to effectively straddle the line between help and hurt. The Melior Group works with large research institutions, regional public universities and small private colleges to improve alumni relations.

To learn more about our work with colleges and universities, visit our Education page or please contact Elizabeth Foley at [email protected] / 215-545-0054 ext 111 or Linda McAleer at [email protected] / 215-545-0054 ext 104.

College marketing logo

Who Manages The Relationship With Area Employers? Hint: It’s Not Always Career Services

April 24, 2015
, , , , , , , , , Higher Education, The Art of Research

In our previous post in the series – “Closing The Perception Gap: Are Students Trained to Put Theory Into Practice?”- we briefly touched on the importance of advancing communications and partnerships with employers to improve the general perception about a college or universities ability to deliver on career preparation. The focus was primarily on strategies that enable students to put theory into practice. When you consider developing partnerships at the executive level, doors can open that lead to true innovation.

While internships, hands-on training and job placement opportunities are vitally important to hiring rates and alumnae career trajectories, this aspect of the employer to institution relationship is largely handled in career services departments and is almost entirely student-focused. If this is the only way the institution is engaging employers, it’s likely that significant longer-term growth strategies have been missed.

Especially important to regional public universities and small private colleges are the following questions. What local or regional challenges exist that your graduates may be highly qualified to resolve? Will they be able to develop specific skills or knowledge that give them the competitive advantage in the hiring process?

Put Market Research To Work

The Melior Group worked with a quasi-urban school district in helping them to develop and enhance partnerships with universities who, with some tweaking, could develop programs that would deliver top-notch teachers who were ready to step-in and work in the type of environment where the district is located. A true partnership, the school district worked directly with faculty to make a direct and significant positive impact on area schools.

Along the way, The Melior Group made an informed pivot in their research design and adjusted geographic parameters to discover that there were nearby rural area school districts that could also benefit greatly from the same innovative techniques. The graduates, armed with the know-how to handle challenges perceived to be urban would also be well suited to assist specific rural populations.

Original Innovation Serves A Second Purpose

Universities that are new to this type of partnership development will want to re-examine the relationships they currently have with area employers by proactively asking insightful questions. What are these employers looking for from a partnership with a university? What unique quality can the university offer an employer to make the relationship valuable?

Buy-in from the top of the administration – with accountability and responsibility at the Vice Presidential level – to develop healthy relationships with employers can significantly increase hiring rates, elevate the school’s image as an innovative partner and substantially improve the longer-term vitality of the community.

The Melior Group works with large research institutions, regional public universities and small private colleges to improve the perception of their schools’ effectiveness by discovering where gaps in perception exist and drilling into what strategic mix of programmatic, communication and partnership initiatives can allow institutions to more easily deliver on expectations.

To learn more about our work with colleges and universities, visit our Education page or please contact Elizabeth Foley at [email protected] / 215-545-0054 x111 or Linda McAleer at [email protected] / 215-545-0054 x104.

Referring Physicians

Hospital Regional Appeal Improves Using Market Research

April 16, 2015
, , Healthcare, The Art of Research

Without the resources to out-spend its competition, an in-city hospital sought a market research partner who could help them improve their image in their local community. In order to maximize the spend, they were in need of smart and efficient direction.

The Melior Group targeted both consumers and primary care physicians to uncover how to convey the hospital’s unique story and build its patient base. Research results helped to direct the hospital towards a new partnership plan, an improved referral process and a deeper focus on the people whose lives were changed for the good…read the full article here.

Elizabeth Cohen is Vice President of The Melior Group, and our lead consultant in our work in the health care sector.  For more information please visit our Healthcare page or contact Elizabeth Cohen at [email protected] / 215-545-0054 ext 103.

Insight and Analytics in the Age of Big Data

April 10, 2015
, , The Art of Research

Technology has enabled us to track vast amounts of data where we collect an overwhelming volume of response analytics, customer, and market data. Big data can tell us every move a customer or prospect makes. How do you use the data to make meaningful conclusions that can influence strategy and tactics?

On April 1st, we joined members of the American Marketing Association and the Marketing Research Association on the 45th Floor of the Comcast Center to grapple with this question.

After a short meet and greet, the group settled into a beautifully appointed conference room over looking the Philadelphia skyline. Event panelists included Kathleen Brunner, (President & CEO, Acumen Analytics), Jim Multari, (Executive Director, Market Planning & Research, Comcast), Aaron Maass (Founder & Owner, Maass Media) and was moderated by Lisa Dezzutti, (President & CEO, Market Connections, Inc.).

The panelists agreed that analytics should not be departmentalized and that traditional market research can lend significant insight and meaning to analytics. Jim Multari suggests that finding ways to collaborate across areas and combine resources can produce unexpected and valuable insights. For example, when you get people together across finance, acquisition, sales, user data, and they get to talking about research and analytics – new ways of thinking about the business can emerge.

Emily Nydick, Market Research Associate of The Melior Group, felt that each member of the panel provided great insight about how to move beyond “analysis paralysis.” By presenting complex research findings to clients in ways that breakdown information and highlight key points, the information becomes easy to understand and grasp for informed decision-making.

With a continually increasing data overload, it becomes ever more important to find the sweet spot at the intersection of analytics and traditional market research. Aaron Maass confirms it is hard to get good data – and the difference really comes from being able to ask good questions.

One of Melior’s hallmarks is presenting the research learnings in an easy-to-read format; we make sense of the data for our clients; and present information in reports that are easy to follow and are usually ready for distribution by our clients internally. We create user-friendly documents…and all are custom-created for the needs of each client.

While keeping business objectives top of mind, a proactive effort to marry market research with analytics in a way that distills down the information needed to tell the story – will produce the best results.

For more information or to request a proposal, please contact The Melior Group at (215)-545-0054 or [email protected].

The Melior Group Helps Avon To Create And Sustain A Culture Of Ethics And Compliance

January 21, 2015
Ethics and Compliance, The Art of Research

Many surveys that measure the impact of programs and policies to instill a culture of Ethics and Compliance in an organization miss one important mark: most often, these surveys ask no more than a couple of questions about ethics and embed them in a large study of corporate culture. This understates the importance of having a corporate climate that recognizes the role of employees in assuring they value ethical behavior and are on board with corporate goals for compliance.

By conducting a survey dedicated solely to Ethics and Compliance, an organization gains more pertinent and actionable guidance for knowing what to do to assure a culture of ethics and compliance (and whether it’s working) than it does by asking these few ethics questions.

One large multinational corporation, Avon, relied on The Melior Group, a specialist in survey research, for its important measurement of ethics and compliance culture. From the survey, Avon learned where its associates need additional training, developed benchmarking metrics for use to measure change, and better understood employee perceptions of the firm with regard to ethical compliance.

Since the survey is conducted by an objective third party, and employees are assured confidentiality of responses, management receives an honest assessment of its communication and implementation programs as well as perceptions of management adherence with Ethics and Compliance policies.

In a recent Inside Counsel article, Richard Davies, Vice President of Legal and Compliance at Avon, shared that an objective standalone employee Ethics and Compliance survey was one of three intertwined methods he recommends an organization use to create and sustain a culture of compliance. The Melior Group created and has conducted this annual survey for Avon since 2013.

For the complete article: http://www.insidecounsel.com/2014/11/18/the-avon-way-creating-and-sustaining-a-culture-of

For more information on Melior’s Ethics and Compliance Survey programs: Contact Sindey Dranoff at [email protected]

Millennials: Where will they go?

November 11, 2014
, , Financial Services, Higher Education, The Art of Research

By Sharon Hackenbracht

As I noted previously in my earlier blog entry the life choices that are being made by millennials are significantly influenced by their parents.

While the recession compelled many millennials to live at home with their parents, a recent study projects that millennials – the largest and most diverse generation in history – will create up to 24 million new households in the next ten years. The Chicago Tribune reports that half of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 report that they plan to ask their parents, and even their grandparents, to help them come up with the down payment needed to purchase a home (as cited by www.trulia.com, 2014).

Where will these households be? How will millennials choose to live? And what furnishings will they decide they need? How will their choices differ from those of their parents, and what, if any, influence will their parents still wield on these choices?

 

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