The hallmarks of our approach:

Hands-on Involvment of Principals in Every Project

Calder LaTour is, by design, a small company, which enables our principals to be personally involved in every project. This includes strategy consultations, study design, questionnaire design, moderation of focus groups, data analysis, and report preparation.

We have an intense commitment to our clients and to the success of their strategic initiatives and marketing efforts.

Knowledge and Experience

-A broad knowledge of determinants of consumer behavior

Our principals have published original research on consumer behavior   topics in a variety of recognized journals. They have also taught marketing courses at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Calder LaTour's ability to uncover and untangle the determinants of consumer behavior has been refined through over 20 years of consulting experience.

-Strategy development experience across a variety of industries

Our principals have provided strategy consulting services to major corporations and organizations in a diverse set of industries. This broad experience enables us to develop sophisticated and innovative solutions to your strategic issues. Examples include:

• Development of successful strategies and tactics for improving customer satisfaction and customer retention at one of the world's largest financial services firms.
• Development of an action plan for sales-force response that was effective in maintaining high market share when a flagship product of a pharmaceutical firm was threatened by charges of management impropriety.
• Assisting manufacturing companies to decide whether to acquire new products, with special consideration of their possible status as niche products versus products with broader appeal.
• Partnering with companies and organizations across a variety of industries to develop successful new products and services.

-Considerable research design expertise

Our senior staff is composed entirely of persons with Master and Ph.D. degrees who have had extensive training in research design and methodology. They have taught research methods and graduate-level statistics courses at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management and at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They have published articles on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Evaluation Review, Decision Sciences and Advances in Consumer Research. For our clients this means:

• More accurate measurement of product and company image perceptions.
• Careful consideration of measurement error, population size and sample size to get you the precision you need.
• Better insight into how feature and pricing variations may affect market share. We have extensive experience with the use of complex experimental designs necessary to make these assessments.

Our methodological expertise also means we are familiar with esoteric but critical issues such as the pitfalls of standard approaches to conjoint analysis for pricing studies and the problems involved with using self-stated measures of importance in survey research.

-Qualitative research expertise

Calder LaTour is known for the depth and quality of its qualitative research. In fact, one of our founders, Dr. Bob Calder, is known for his seminal work on focus groups and other forms of qualitative research. A further example is our development of sophisticated thought listing and cognitive response methodologies to obtain more thorough diagnostic evaluations of advertising, sales materials, and Web sites.

We typically transcribe focus groups and individual in-depth interviews and subject the transcripts to detailed content analysis. Our reports include a detailed presentation of customer perspectives, and numerous quotes to support the conclusions. You receive both a top-line summary and an in-depth presentation of your customers' perceptions.

-Extensive statistical knowledge and skills

We offer state-of-the-art statistical techniques, including structural equation modeling, latent segment analysis, and several proprietary approaches to data analysis. For example, our unique factor regression approach to modeling the determinants of customer decision making reduces measurement error due to insufficient sampling of the construct domain, measurement error resulting from differences in scale usage, and multicollinearity. The result is that our models tend to explain a much higher percentage of variance in consumer behavior than is typical. We have also developed proprietary graphical presentations of the results of such analyses to facilitate visualization and understanding of study results.

Custom Research, Tailored to Your Needs

We never try to fit your problem into a pre-determined methodology. We discuss with you the issues you are facing and the questions you have, then suggest an approach to your problem. Our team works with you to determine the project's objectives, scope, methodology and time frame. It is possible that one of the approaches to marketing research or strategy development described in this brochure will fit your needs. But everything we do is client specific. We have no "standard products" to sell.

Commitment to Quality Data Collection

Proposing a complex factorial research design is one thing, having it fielded correctly is another. Selecting a "hard-to-reach" segment for interviewing is easy, properly completing those interviews is not. For over 20 years we have recognized the critical importance of the data collection process. Our senior staff members work closely with our own field staff to ensure that questions are understood and interpreted by respondents as intended and that respondents are randomly assigned to experimental groups. These aspects of marketing research are usually hidden from sight, but without a strong commitment to quality collection, data can have little value. Ask us why we rarely use computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI)!

Thorough, Action-oriented Reports

We strive to write every report so that it is as transparent as possible. In other words, we provide enough detail and express it so clearly that even those in your organization not directly involved in planning the study understand what was done, what was found and the bases for our conclusions and recommendations. Our reports of qualitative research contain extensive verbatim quotes; our reports of quantitative research present data graphically and explain its interpretation and implications. We never leave you with just presentation-style sets of tables and graphs and little interpretation. We believe the more you understand your project, the more likely you are to use the results to make better decisions about your products and services.