Market research news
The blog of the market research agency IntoTheminds lists opinionated articles, examples of alignment with marketing theory, highlights and bad buzz, carefully selected by Pierre-Nicolas Schwab, his team and influential experts.
Retail: here’s how you can make it easy for people to buy more
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
How do you make sure your products are visible among a larger assortment and immediately attract shoppers' attention ? By using visual salience. Summary Highlighting products in supermarket shelves Help the shopper's brain make decisions What can be done to…
Market analysis: what’s the future of supermarkets ?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
How will supermarkets look like in 10 year from now ? Will employees be replaced by robots or won't there just be any employees left ? While points of sales are more and more resembling an extension of online businesses…
Retail : here’s how Lego ensures customers buy more
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Supermarkets used to earn a lot of mony just before checkout. All the gums, sweets, ... were there to tempt customers and add fat money to the bottom line. With the advent of smartphones retailers were surprized to see their…
Everything will be purchased online: only those offline businesses will survive
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
What will remain of brick-and-mortar stores in 20 years from now ? Not much. Consumers will adopt online behaviors and will visit physical points of sale on very few occasions : when forced to to enjoy a very special customer…
Market research : how do sales of electric vehicles in Europe look like?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
The European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) released recently an interactive maps that presents the state of the market for electric vehicles in the European Union. The figures presented refer to Electric-Chargeable Vehicles (ECV's) sold in Europe in 2016. The numbers remain…
A qualitative market research of the Hollister & Co. brand perceptions
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
How do you explore customers' perceptions about a brand ? Which methodologies should you use to elicitate brand images ? A recent research published in the Journal of Retailing explores consumers' perception of Hollister and Co. and uses for this…
The next hand-written you’ll get may have been produced by those robots
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Is there anything better for customer satisfaction than getting a personal hand-written note? The pleasure of getting one will soon fade away once the secret to thousands of mass produced hand-written notes gets revealed. Why do personal hand-written notes so…
Dynamic pricing in retail : can smart shelves lead to discrimination?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
We presented in another article a great innovation presented at the NRF2018 retail show this year : smart shelves. Those smart shelves are especially interesting because of their built-in cameras to detect customers' faces and interact accordingly with them. As…
Uber wants your data to support its own (ghost) kitchen business
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
This is one of the most interesting articles I've read in a past few weeks. Nick Abouzeid's article on Medium is a excellent, well researched article that sheds light on trends in the shared economy business that are yet unknown in…
Social networks destroy society: what should be done?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Social networks are being accused by their own creators to destroy society and to tear human beings apart (read the interview of Chamath Palihapitya who is a former Facebook VP). At the same time movements like Time Well Spent emerged to…
Online market research reveals the #1 factor to reduce showrooming
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Showrooming is a massive problem for brick-and-mortar retailers. Customers visit stores but eventually make their purchases online. Operating a brick-and-mortar point of sale becomes more and more difficult. A scientific research reveals the #1 thing retailers should do to avoid…
The history of media resistance : from printing to social media through TV and radio
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Throughout history people have shown remarkable resistance to new forms of media, be it books, cinema, radio, TV or Internet. Today social media addiction leads to a new form of resistance. A new book by Trine Syvertsen sums up remarkably…
The 3 benefits of the new “Tap To Go” Ahold no-checkout supermarket
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Since Amazon has launched its no-checkout Amazon Go store (see our article here), other retailers are keen on experimenting the same type of innovation. Ahold Delhaize is currently testing its "tap to go" system in a "Albert Heijn To Go"…
Zalando free-returns policy drives customer loyalty up
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Online retailer Zalando has announced revenues of €4.5b in 2017, up 23% from the year before. Despite a slight decrease of its Ebit (from 5.9% to 4.7%-4.9%), profits before taxes will be over €200m. This is a very solid result…
Retail innovation: smart shelves enable dynamic pricing
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
The biggest retail show on earth just opened its doors in New York. The NRF 2018 is the ideal place to observe market trends in the retail sector (professional shows in general are very good places to start market research:…
Market research combines Big Data and qualitative techniques .. 120 years ago
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Visualizing data has become a standard task and one essential component of data science today. But, haven't we forgotten how lucky we are to have all that data available and to be able to use it for various purposes ?…
If you are addicted to your social media, it’s because you suffer of FOMO
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
A recent research (Blackwell et al. 2017) has investigated the antecedents of social media addiction. In other words, what makes us look at Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter dozens of times every single day. Five variables were tested : age, extraversion, neuroticism,…
Which future for Borsalino ?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
One of the most iconic Italian brands, hats-maker Borsalino, filled for Bankruptcy on 18 December 2017. This story proves that even the most renown brands, those with the longest history (110 years of activity) are not immune against evolving market…
Ghost kitchens : the next disruption in the restaurant industry?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
I recently reflected on Deliveroo's and Uber's ghost kitchens which have appeared in various cities (read here and there) of the US and in London (read this article in the Guardian). Those ghost kitchen make perfect economic sense : margins…
New in 2018: step-by-step market research guide for all
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Happy new year everybody ! What an amazing year 2017 has been for us. We feel blessed to have carried out so many market research and Big Data projects last year : banking, retail, media, FMCG, luxury, IT, indusrail goods,…
Give me my time back ! I’m a digital slave.
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
It happens again and again and there is nothing I can do. The temptation is too big. I can't resist staring at my screen and losing my time watching and doing things that I don't really want to do. Rather…
Have black boxes led to bankruptcies in the restaurant industry ?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Back in 2015 Belgian authorities announced that B2C firms selling more than 25000€ per year in food (restaurants thus), would have to be equipped by July 2016 with a new model of cash register containing a black box registering all transactions. This,…
Marketing research reveals free apps are bad for business
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
A recent marketing research published in the Journal of Marketing reveals that offering a free version of an app reduces the speed of adoption of the paying version of the same app. In other words, you will reduce the odds…
market research : how do Europeans pay ?
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
My mother-in-law is Italian. She hardly make two payments a year with her credit card. On my way to the University of Mainz a few weeks ago, I met a 64-year old taxi driver of Turkish origin who prouded himself not to…
