Experimenting With The Consumer

Experimenting With The Consumer exposes the hazards of the mass-market experimentation in which every American consumer and worker is unwittingly tapped for product risk data by manufacturers, scientists, and regulators. Vioxx, Heparin, Avandia, Paxil, fen-phen, estrogens, silicone implants, pacemakers, formaldehyde in FEMA trailers, 60 buckyballs in coatings ... the headlines are increasingly filled with hidden risks coming to light in popular products years after federal agencies approve them for the American public. Shapo shows readers how to get past unreasonable trust or fear and make the best risk-management choices for themselves and their families. He walks them through what questions to ask before consenting to be in a clinical trial; how to evaluate the implied bold-print claims against the small-print disclosures in advertisements for medical products; how to uncover product and environmental risks in their homes, workplaces, supermarkets, and neighborhoods; how to assess and control product risk while maximizing consumer choice and benefit; how to pressure government to tighten consumer protection; and how to seek legal redress. Through a diverse selection of dramatic case studies, Shapo lays bare the incentives of companies and entrepreneurial scientists to fake or obscure experimental data before and after government approval; the fights between interested and disinterested scientists over data; the fights between scientists and doctors over patient rights; the campaigns of activists against government agencies to release experimental drugs; the impact of the journalistic and promotional media on public knowledge and perception of product risk; and the marketing tricks that manufacturers use to harness sexual desire to product launches and to shape the prescription choices of physicians.

Don't fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book. It guides you through best practices in business experimentation, illustrates how these practices work at leading companies, and answers some fundamental questions: What makes a good experiment? How do you test in online and brick-and-mortar businesses? In B2B and B2C? How do you build an experimentation culture? Also, best practice means running many experiments. Indeed, some hugely successful companies, such as Amazon, Booking.com, and Microsoft, run tens of thousands of controlled experiments annually, engaging millions of users. Thomke shows us how these and many other organizations prove that experimentation provides significant competitive advantage. How can managers create this capability at their own companies? Essential is developing an experimentation organization that prizes the science of testing and puts the discipline of experimentation at the center of its innovation process. While it once took companies years to develop the tools for such large-scale experiments, advances in technology have put these tools at the fingertips of almost any business professional. By combining the power of software and the rigor of controlled experiments, today's managers can make better decisions, create magical customer experiences, and generate big financial returns. Experimentation Works is your guidebook to a truly new way of thinking and innovating.

Have you been spending more than ever on marketing, but feel like your customers are responding less? Have you been generous with your customers, giving them bigger discounts, loyalty programs, the best-trained staff and helpful emails, but it still doesn't seem to be enough? Do you know the retail environment has changed, but you're not sure how to respond? Customers across all industries have changed dramatically in recent years, but many retailers have failed to understand or keep up. Retailers who don't respond to the new problems of their customers will quickly be left behind. In this groundbreaking book about winning back the modern customer, Amy Roche describes the 'experiments' she performed in her own retail store. In The Retail Experiment you'll learn how to: leave behind old retail methods that no longer work understand, value and engage with the modern customer evaluate and capitalise on the changed shopping environment market to and communicate with customers make your store an exciting place to visit appeal to the emotions of your customers successfully position your business in the 'experience economy'. Amy examines winning strategies, pitfalls and fails, and the five strategies she discovered that drew customers in like magnets, increasing visitation, sales, and overall engagement.

This is a book targeting actors in the field of marketing academic researchers, practitioners, market analysts, teachers and students with an interest in how customers are influenced by marketing. The main argument is that the experiment constitutes a powerful method for revealing the influence of various marketing activities. Basically, an experiment means that individuals are randomly allocated to groups, which receive different treatments, followed by a comparison of the groups reactions after the treatments. To conduct experiments along these lines, however, involves several choices and challenges, and the ambition with this book is to offer guidelines to experimenters who wish to come to terms with influence-related issues in a marketing context.

The chapter starts with a positioning of this dissertation in the marketing discipline. It then provides a comparison of the two most popular methods for studying consumer preferences/choices, namely conjoint analysis and discrete choice experiments. Chapter 1 continues with a description of the context of discrete choice experiments. Subsequently, the research problems and the objectives ofthis dissertation are discussed. The chapter concludes with an outline of the organization of this dissertation. 1. 1 Positioning of the Dissertation During this century, increasing globalization and technological progress has forced companies to undergo rapid and dramatic changes-for some a threat, for others it offers new opportunities. Companies have to survive in a Darwinian marketplace where the principle of natural selection applies. Marketplace success goes to those companies that are able to produce marketable value, Le. , products and services that others are willing to purchase (Kotler 1997). Every company must be engaged in new-product development to create the new products customers want because competitors will do their best to supply them. Besides offering competitive advantages, new products usually lead to sales growth and stability. As household incomes increase and consumers become more selective, fmns need to know how consumers respond to different features and appeals. Successful products and services begin with a thorough understanding of consumer needs and wants. Stated otherwise, companies need to know about consumer preferences to manufacture tailor-made products, consumers are willing to buy.

Consumers have been increasingly involved in the innovation process in the last few decades, a major driving force of business success. This involvement is critically important for innovation, particularly in product development. However, consumers frequently cannot articulate exactly what they need, want, or like if they are asked directly. It is very difficult for consumers to articulate their needs and desires. Therefore, researchers have to use other means to understand their motivations. There are many arguments suggesting that focus groups cannot create a reliable direction for new product development (NPD) or message optimization. A solution for this problem lies in a systematic, structured and disciplined experimentation with consumers - presenting them with a set of experimentally-designed products or concepts and soliciting their preferences. It is much easier for consumers to choose a preferred option from a set of concepts. New technologies make it easier than ever to conduct complex experiments quickly and inexpensively. The expanded use of experimentation provides an opportunity to take innovation to a new level. Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) is an increasingly popular, structured, consumer-based experimentation methodology. RDE works with prototypes, either physical prototypes, prototypes created out of language (concepts), or prototypes created out of visual stimuli (design and packaging). In business, RDE is used both to understand existing products, product categories and packages, as well as to create next generation offerings in the process of new product development (NPD). Rule Developing Experimentation: A Systematic Approach to Understand & Engineer the Consumer Mind explains RDE concepts, beginning from its origins, to novel consumer research techniques and covers applications relevant to a real market context. Readers are also introduced to the concept of Mind Genomicsʼ - a more holistic approach to gaining insight into the consumer mind.

A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.