The Harris Interactive Brand & Strategy Consulting Practice utilizes specific methodologies and research tools to provide the in-depth actionable insights our clients need to build on their brand equity. Each research project, whether domestic or global, may utilize any of these research techniques.

VISTA (Values In STrategy Assessment)

VISTA is a unique qualitative methodology developed by Harris Interactive to fully understand the rational and emotional factors that connect your product, service, brand, category, or issue position to your target audience.

VISTA provides a template to guide strategic action in marketing and communication choices. Companies utilize the insights gained through VISTA to:

• Understand the equities and disequities of their brand or offering
• Reorganize their offerings to align with customer motivations
• Motivate stakeholders through effective communications
• Further segment and target their customers

VISTA (Values In STrategy Assessment)

Brand Architecture

Brand Architecture is a proprietary approach we use to quantitatively understand how to link your brand more effectively to the emotional benefits people seek. Brand Architecture seeks to understand how your brand fits among competitive brands or understand the relationship of sub-brands or an umbrella brand. Building on Harris Interactive’s well-known understanding of the role of values and emotions in consumer decision-making, this methodology leads to a brand positioning that powerfully connects your brand with your target consumers.

Strategic Cube

The Strategic Cube is a proprietary analytic tool used to sort through and organize many messages or communications options. The Cube is mainly used for developing communication strategies relating to corporate, product, service or category positioning, and provides current views relevant to your business as well as those of your competitors.  The Cube is also used for broader applications, including, identifying real problems in product performance or service delivery and identifying unique market opportunities

Gaining insights on personalized and relevant attribute/benefit perceptions combined with the ratings of the client and its competitors help us to identify the most promising positioning opportunities.

PulseLine

PulseLine is an instant-feedback technology which allows you to test and calibrate your corporate communication in real time. Used in a focus group setting, this tool is used to successfully guide the development of communications by gathering the independent and collective reactions to specific communications messages, spokespeople and vehicles like television and audio commercials, speeches, and other forms of advertising and corporate communications.

Complexity Science

Complexity Science (CS) provides a framework for thinking about a business issue.   CS also leverages a set of methods, in the form of representative modeling, to solve a range of strategic and tactical level marketing and business challenges. Clients have successfully employed insights from Complexity Science models to:

• Examine the impact of word-of-mouth on their brands & messages
• Allocate resources to maximize ROI for marketing and activities
• Link the elements and attributes of brand drivers to consumer behavior
• Build business performance models that locate their brands activity within the larger arena of the competitive set and the national economic climate

Complexity Science models offer a dynamic view of the business landscape.  The predictive qualities of the model can be applied under a variety of market conditions.

Complex "wholes" result from the repeated interactions among the smaller elements of which they are composed.   The methods of Complexity Science provide an ability to look at disparate data, diverse units of measure; various temporal series, and account for redundant and missing measures.  A number of analysis tools are part of the Complexity Science approach, including: neural networks, genetic algorithms, Bayesian belief nets, self organizing maps, and agent based models.

Communication Workshops

The Communication Workshop helps your communicators, marketers, or any cross-functional team better understand and use the research results to improve all its communications efforts. Participants can include both internal and external communicators such as publications staff, ad agencies, PR practitioners, speechwriters and so on. The workshop is an efficient and effective way to immerse the team in information, to turn new knowledge into practice and action, and to integrate key messages throughout the company.