Rubinson Partners, Inc.
Marketing and Research Consulting for a Brave New World
A sampling of RPI client assignments
Started in 2010, Rubinson Partners, Inc. (RPI) has already helped position research buyers, research suppliers, and digital marketing firms for success in a digital age:
- For ShareThis, led one of the largest analyses of social media sharing behavior ever conducted, showing advertisers how to leverage sharing behavior. See presentation ” Share is more than fans, friends and followers”
- For a leading CPG, designed and managed one of the largest and most comprehensive digital sensing and listening platforms ever created
- For Appnation, created the first comprehensive summary of the “app-economy” focusing on smart phones and tablets
- Helped to create a way of passively determining digital display ad effectiveness for Moat
- In partnership with InsightsNow, Inc. RPI is creating a next generation system for innovation called BehaviorLens ™
- For a major marketer, helping to shape a new approach to digital media measurement and ROI assessment
- Conducted numerous workshops on shopper insights and shopper marketing
How can Rubinson Partners help you? Contact us…
Technology is producing bone-rattling change in everyday life. Imagine location-aware offers, brand stories, and payment all converging at point of purchase via your smart phone; this is already happening in parts of Asia. Imagine addressable and interactive TV so two people watching the same show don’t see the same commercials; it’s coming. As touchpoints emerge (weekly it seems), marketing and research approaches need to constantly evolve.
In such an environment, there is tremendous opportunity for agile marketers and insights organizations to disrupt markets by addressing constantly emerging unmet needs. No market leader is grandfathered in anymore; ask My Space, Palm, or Circuit City. Like a Yankee-Red Sox game, no lead is safe.
Here are some key marketers’ unmet needs that I have seen from my perch at the ARF.
Brand-building
- What does brand success look like in a digital, social media age? What are the new rules and metrics for brand-building now that the consumer has so much control?
- How do we activate “store back” thinking? We know that 50% or more of purchase decisions are made at point of purchase. R&D has shown that over half of grocery products bought for the first time are discovered in-store. Store brands are gaining share by winning at point of purchase and marketers are struggling to reestablish the basis for their price premium in the minds of consumers and retailers. Marc Pritchard, Procter CMO says, “If it doesn’t work at the shelf, it’s a miss.” Yet, no research tools have emerged as standards for acting on this philosophy.
- How do we create and measure a social media strategy? How do we build ambassadors without losing control of our brand’s meaning or creating activists turning against us?
- How do we manage brands globally while activating them locally in ways that are relevant to local culture and the local retailing environment?
Innovation
- How do we redesign our innovation process? Innovation starts with deep understanding of how people live their lives which might translate into new media or product experiences per se (like Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty) rather than launching new SKUs. Listening for the unexpected is a springboard into blue ocean ideas, yet how does a marketer listen in a valid rather than anecdotal way? One research director told me that what keeps her up at night is the fear that the next big thing will happen and she will miss it. How do we create sensing systems to convert potential misses into market leadership opportunities?
Media
- How do we redesign media strategy approaches in this digital, multiplatform, consumer pull world where measurement is falling farther and farther behind media possibilities?
- How do we leverage location-based and addressable mobile touchpoints to bring the right brand message to exactly the right person, place, and context and as part of a larger media strategy?
- Advertiser vs. media-company agendas seem to be diverging as the common understanding of “audience” breaks down. Media companies have focused on cumulating multiplatform reach and frequency while advertisers are trying to unpack audiences to serve impressions to high-yield customers at the exact right moment along the path to purchase. There is a critical need to bring the dialogue back together.
Insights and research
- How do we augment the research toolkit to align with, and even lead, contemporary marketing thinking? Intentions translate into action less than half the time, yet the research profession continues to focus more on studying intentions than on decision influencers. We are asking questions that cognitive science tells us people can’t answer. We sense the richness of information that comes at us like a continual river from massive and unstructured databases: social media, search, digital behavior, and shopper databases; yet strategies for synthesizing learning from such information streams, integrated with valid survey-based metrics, is an emerging art.
- How do we create an insights team that can act on the ARF research transformation model where insights value creation comes from synthesis, communication, and taking a stand on the “now what”, rather than just “running projects”?