MSG data fusion techniques seed new growth opportunities for fresh-foods company

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What does the word Fusion mean to you? You might identify that term with nuclear power, the holy grail of carbon-free energy creation. Or you might think of Jazz fusion, the blend of traditional jazz instrumentation with electronic rock instruments. In the market research industry, fusion refers to the powerful melding of data from various sources with analytical and segmentation intelligence to account for challenges and deficiencies in survey research. 

While there is no doubt that customer surveys will always play a key role in forming business strategies, the fact of the matter is, respondents are less likely to fill out long and complex questionnaires than they used to be. We live in a world of diminishing returns.

But this is only half the picture. When it comes to ancillary data from commercial sources, the harvest of quality data about consumers is a rich and bountiful yield. Companies now have the power to augment their internal customer data with supplemental external data. 

What kinds of data do we have in mind? Think about how data such as granular geodemographics, socioeconomic characteristics, attitudinal and behavioral indicators could augment existing surveys and records. This is where the fusion concept applies. By fusing some or all of these aspects, you are likely to get a fuller, more accurate picture of your customer base. 

MSG’s data scientists work with clients to pull data from various sources, apply nuanced analytical and segmentation techniques to it, then output a robust, empirical basis for business decision making. Fusing data, then applying advanced analytics, means businesses are less in the dark than before. By reaching beyond simple statistical analysis, better inferences and more nuanced decisions can be made. 

Client Case Study

To see how this works in the real world, read this case study about one of our clients is in the fresh-fruits and vegetables delivery business. They take fresh produce that isn’t pretty enough to go on the supermarket shelves, which might otherwise go to waste, and get it into the hands of customers. The problem was the company didn’t know enough about their current customer base to be able to formulate a plausible growth plan. They knew that new market opportunities were out there, but they didn’t know where to look for them, because data items for each customer were scant. They needed better answers to questions like 

  • What are the key characteristics of profitable customers across multiple markets?
  • What characteristics differentiate loyal customers from the rest?
  • Which geo-demographic segments include higher concentrations of loyal customers?
  • How can loyal customers be located in new markets?

To tackle these questions, MSG developed a fusion plan involving an array of techniques:

  • Map creation and plotting of all current customer locations
  • Individual and household demographic variables appended to each customer.
  • Classification and regression analytics used to zero-in on key predictors. 
  • A series of spatial analyses to identify geographic clusters in new markets similar to existing markets.

Check out the full case study to see how the company achieved a much better grasp of their good recurring customers, where they were clustered geographically, what they looked like demographically, and what areas in markets of interest had the highest likelihood of potential new customers (people with similar demographics as the known customers).

Fusion of internal and external data can help your company to fill in the knowledge gaps, make more accurate inferences, and seed growth opportunities for new products, services, and markets. 

The Advantages of the Advanced Cellular Frame

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One of the strengths of MSG’s new Advanced Cellular Frame is its ability to address inward and outward migration of cellular telephone users.  This feature allows for the employment of Disproportionate Stratified Sampling (DSS) designs – or in other vernacular – split-frame designs. We can illustrate this using a typical scenario.  

Say you are targeting a metro area like Multnomah County, OR – home to the city of Portland.  There are, in essence, three ways you can define a cellular telephone sample frame targeting Multnomah County. 

One method is using a traditional EPSEM (equal probability of selection method) RDD design.  This is the method that has been around for well over 10 years.   We first identify the rate centers that best fit Multnomah County.  Every possible telephone number in the cellular thousand blocks (first 7 digits of a telephone number) that originate from the selected rate centers make up the sample frame.  This RDD frame design contains a mixture of working and non-working/unassigned telephone numbers. 

Multnomah County, OR 
RDD Frame (Traditional EPSEM) 2,057,000 100.0% 
Listed In-Area 348,497 16.9% 
Listed Out of Area 804,686 39.1% 
Unlisted/Unassigned 903,817 43.9% 

This method, however, has some serious drawbacks, but more importantly, it does not address migration – people who have moved in and out of Multnomah County and kept their cellular telephone number.   Look at the highlighted line in the table above.  39% of the RDD EPSEM frame is known to be outside of Multnomah County.  Additionally, the RDD EPSEM frame excludes anyone who has since moved into the county from other parts of the country.  The result of this behavior is high under coverage and high out-of-area.  It’s simply an inefficient and costly design. 

The Advanced Cellular Frame dramatically improves upon the shortcomings of the traditional RDD design.  We can still employ an EPSEM design by including both known and unknown cellular telephones.  But, this design addresses the migration issue.   Look at the highlighted row in the table below.  This design now includes cellular numbers for individuals who have since moved into Multnomah County from other parts of the state or country (inward migration).  It also excludes cellular numbers known to be outside Multnomah County (outward migration).  This all but erases the inefficiencies of dialing known out of area out of area numbers while at the same time improving in-area coverage.  This design is still an EPSEM methodology because it includes the unlisted/unassigned portion in order to provide full coverage of Multnomah County.  When sampling, every telephone number has an equal probability of selection.  

Multnomah County, OR 
ACF Frame (EPSEM) 1,449,089 100.0% 
Listed 545,272 37.6% 
In Area 348,497 24.0% 
Inward migration 196,775 13.6% 
Outward migration 0 0.0% 
Unlisted/Unassigned 903,817 62.4% 

Building on the improved EPSEM design noted above is the fact that we can now employ Disproportionate Stratified Sample designs (DSS) using the Advanced Cellular Frame.  We can separate the Listed and Unlisted/Unassigned components of a sample frame into individual strata.  This enables you to sample the more efficient listed stratum at a higher rate and under sample the less efficient unlisted/unassigned stratum at a lower rate.  Every number in the cellular sample frame still has a probability of selection but DSS will yield a more productive sample over a simple EPSEM design. 

Click Here to learn more about the Advanced Cellular Frame today!

Coffee Quip: an insightful new video series about survey research topics that matter

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Have you ever noticed how many of the best workplace conversations tend to happen around the water cooler or the coffee lounge? When coworkers converse in the midst of informal “stop and chat” spaces, they are more candid than they would be in an official meeting. Often, they tell better stories, too. You can pick up a lot of useful knowledge from experts by hanging around such spaces.  

To emulate those kinds of conversations, we would like to introduce you to Coffee Quip, a new MSG series of short video chats between a panel of product and subject matter experts. 

Click Here to Watch Now

The field of survey research is an ever more complex and dynamic one, and it can be hard to get at the inside knowledge needed to accomplish what you want to do. At MSG, we want our customers to benefit from the experience and wisdom of industry-leading Subject Matter Experts. They are the Yoda, the Obi-Wan, the architects of our products and services. They know how survey research gets done, what works and what doesn’t, and why.   

Coffee Quip: Need to Know Info That’s Easy to Watch 

Sometimes the best things come in small packages, and too much of a good thing can get to be too much. Sure, you can gain quality industry knowledge is by attending a formal webinar, but that can be time consuming. In light of this reality, we have produced each Coffee Quip episode to run a mere 8 to 12 minutes, less time than it takes to down your first cup of morning java.  

The informal, light, unscripted discussions are hosted by Marketing and Communications team member Greg Pizzola. You will learn about critical and timely survey research topics and products, such as Advanced Cellular Frame, Hybrid Sampling, and our ARCS platform. You also get to see members of our Sales Development and Customer Success teams, who are on the front lines working with clients every day. They pose the kinds of questions to our experts that customers are asking them.   

Coffee Quip is about your needs and interests, and we encourage you to submit topics for future discussion. Send your questions and topic ideas to SusanEmery@m-s-g.com

Make sure to subscribe to the MSG YouTube channel so you don’t miss any of the upcoming episodes.  

Stepping Out: Pushing the reset button in the wake of Covid19

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What a difference a year makes. In Summer 2020, many of us were in lockdown/quarantine mode, working from home, learning how to Zoom, hoarding toilet paper, trying to stay patient, hoping for vaccines to come. We dealt with the fear of getting sick, the isolation, and we grieved the loss of friends and loved ones. By any measure, it was a tough year, about as far from “normal” as you can get. 

The year 2021 feels distinctly different, doesn’t it? In the United States at the time of this writing, nearly half the population is fully vaccinated. Slowly, surely, we are beginning to feel more empowered. We can see the end of the pandemic, or at least it feels like we’ll be able to manage it. Schools and workplaces are opening up. The masks are coming off.  

It’s strange how the things we used to take for granted feel alien to us now. Things like going out to eat, visiting friends and family, entering a shopping mall, going to a house of worship, traveling. It’s like we have to relearn how to be normal. As a cartoon in the New Yorker said it so well, “I forget how to people.” It’s like we have to figure out how to start over again. How do we reboot our lives? 

We have learned a lot about ourselves in the past year, who we are, who we want to be, and what truly matters. Here’s a thought. Maybe, as we step gingerly back into the life stream, we will remember the daily practices of self-care that guided us through a very trying year. Maybe we won’t forget to appreciate the simple pleasures and the people that matter.  

As life begins to open up and we relearn how “to people,” remember to be patient with others and yourself. Here’s to a summer and a “new normal” that feels better, calmer, and more comfortable. We hope you enjoy everything the summer has to offer!  

6 POSITIVE ASPECTS OF WORKING FROM HOME

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It is fair to say that we were all happy to see the year 2020 in the rear-view mirror. The new year brings the promise of Covid19 vaccine relief, and maybe (just maybe) a return to some normalcy. In the meantime, many of us remain working from home. To be honest, it sometimes feels like living under house arrest! At MSG, we miss being physically in the presence of our colleagues. We miss the water cooler conversations and casual interactions. We stay close over Teams, but it’s just not quite the same. Such isolation can be unnerving and wearying, but in the spirit of the new year, we asked our teammates to share some silver linings they have found inside the cloud. What are some benefits about working from home?

More time to spend with kids. For those of us with children, we can spend more precious time around them. The kids aren’t going to be little ones forever. OK, OK, maybe that sentiment held for the first month or two, before everyone started climbing the walls! But you get the idea. It’s good to be reminded how much our families matter.  

Being more productive without worrying about commute. Honestly, how many of us miss the drive to work? The past year has made us more aware of the time we spend moving from home to workplace. That is time better spent catching up on email and planning our day.  And think of all the money saved in gas and wear and tear on your automobile! One thing you might miss about the commute, however, is the transition time. Commuting gives you space between home and work life. How do we cope when that buffer collapses? On to our next point….

Being more strategic about time management. One of the major challenges of working from home is finding ways to juggle all the responsibilities of homelife on top of the regular workday responsibilities. We have become better planners.  It is important to set some boundaries and rituals to give your day a semblance of structure. We have also become better multitaskers, finding ways to be more flexible, like say, doing the laundry and feeding the pets in between meetings.

Closer bonds and time with the family. The pandemic has made us appreciate the time we have together. We’ve become closer and more appreciative of our loved ones.  As one of our salespeople puts it, “if it were not for COVID we would not spend this much time together, and because of the pandemic we have all learned to be flexible and to get creative with entertaining ourselves.” Cooking, crafting, doing puzzles, and decluttering—these kinds of activities can be shared with loved ones. They are opportunities to make memories that will be cherished in years to come.

More “outside time”. Because we’re not stuck in the car each morning and afternoon running to and from work, it’s a lot easier to step out for some fresh air, walk the dog, recommit to that morning exercise routine. Attendance at local parks and open space preserves is up. You’ll find plenty of people enjoying quality “back to nature” moments. All of this is good for the spirit.  

More time with our animals. Let’s talk pets. Better yet, let’s revel in the cameo appearances they make during virtual meetings. Who doesn’t love seeing this?! Pets make us smile. They reveal our better nature. They have been faithful companions through a very difficult time. Where would we be without them? They make the workday much more bearable.

As the months wear on with no clear end to the pandemic in sight, working from home is going to remain challenging. Hang in there and take time for self-care. Recognize how the slower pace allows us to appreciate the simple things in life.

Toni Morrison’s advice on work/life boundaries

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In the past year, we have all been struggling to maintain some measure of work/life balance. Blame it on Covid19, if you like, but even in the good old so-called “normal times,” workers have had to juggle competing demands from work, family, friends, service, and that all too rare commodity known as “me time.”  

It being Black History Month, we would like to share some wisdom from one of our greatest African-American writers, the novelist and Nobel prize winner, Toni Morrison. Toni published a brief essay in The New Yorker magazine back in 2017 called “The Work You Do, The Person You Are.” The essay recalls an early job she had as a child in the 1940’s, cleaning the house of a presumably white, wealthier lady, for two dollars a day. Toni would give half her wages to her parents. “The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound,” she writes. Morrison took pride in the job, but also became frustrated as more duties were asked of her. When she complained about it to her family, Toni’s father gave her some sage advice: “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.” 

Toni derived four lessons from that quote, which for those of us trying to navigate the turbulent waters of work pressures and responsibilities and home, serve as helpful reminders of what really matters.  

 
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself. 
 
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you. 
 
3. Your real life is with us, your family. 
 
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are. 

Morrison concludes, “…I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.”  

To read the full essay, check out https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are 

A Lesson in Black History from Stevie Wonder

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To commemorate Black History Month, let’s do a retro music rewind to the year 1976 and the classic album by musical genius Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life. This Grammy award winner for album of the year is famous for the hits “Sir Duke” (a tribute to Duke Ellington), “Isn’t She Lovely,” and “I Wish.” When digging into the album’s deep cuts, you’ll find a song called “Black Man,” an 8-and-a-half-minute history lesson about the contributions made by black and brown people to American history. The timing seemed fitting, seeing as the album was released in the USA bicentennial year. 

In this funky exercise in consciousness raising, we learn about African-American figures, many of whom never got the attention they deserved in history class. People like the first man to die for the American flag (Crispus Attucks), the first heart surgeon (Dr. Daniel Hale Williams), the first clock maker in America and surveyor of the District of Columbia(Benjamin Banneker), the first man to set foot on the north pole (Matthew Henson), the founder of blood plasma and director of the Red Cross blood bank (Dr Charles Drew), the inventor of the first stop light and gas mask (Garrett Morgan), the founder of the city of Chicago (Jean Baptiste), and the woman who led slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad (Harriet Tubman).  

Essentially, “Black Man” presents Stevie’s vision of a multiracial democracy, as expressed in the chorus:  

We pledge allegiance 
All our lives 
To the magic colors 
Red, blue and white 
But we all must be given 
The liberty that we defend 
For with justice not for all men 
History will repeat again 
Its time we learned 
This world was made for all men 
 

Words to live and learn by!  

For a full listing of the celebrated historical figures mentioned in the song, check out this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Man_(song) 

Youtube version of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEoE2UQXduA 

ARCS Update

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At Marketing Systems Group, we believe that research is the key to any organization—product or service based—and we want to pursue creative solutions that help our customers to effectively and efficiently run their research projects. That is our core mission. As we pursue that mission, ARCS is evolving into something bigger and better. In this blog post, we want to give an update of the progress made and where we are heading.

Srinath Sankar, VP of Product Development puts it this way: “We’re looking to build a unified research operation platform that can help our customers to engage with their audience, collect insights, and manage the process as a whole. If you asked me ten years ago the definition of ARCS, I’d have said, it’s a panel management tool. Now we don’t see it that way. We want to cover as much of the research environment—the scope of recruitment, the administration of participants, the data collection piece, the management of people in the organization, governance and compliance, security tools, infrastructure, and more.”

We have designed ARCS to work within different contexts and multiple roles that our customers have to play. We are already known as a strong recruitment administration platform, and we help customers with their needs for compliance, security requirements, and consents. Now we are taking the platform into new regions to see how we can help you build research libraries, how to make process management better, and how to improve automation.

Communication framework

We have always felt that the communication framework is the core to the ARCS platform. We have taken strides towards improving audience engagement by partnering with Twilio. The result is a brand new product, ARCS Voice.

In the old ARCS, if you wanted to do a reminder call to participants, you would either do it manually or use our IVR system to make the call. Now you can accomplish the task with a simple web app; no infrastructure is required. Just log into the app, provide a script, and send the message across SMS.

Within ARCS Voice, you can create different projects and set up call flows and trigger different actions such as transfer call, play another message, and so on. You can also create and pull from call lists, control callbacks, and run reports.

Formerly, ARCS could send only outbound text messages to participants. Now we have a two-way street. You can receive inbound messages, and thanks to improved email queue handling, our smart priority queue feature can flag higher priority tasks and execute those critical actions in a timely manner.

We have also created an inbound message center within ARCS that permits various customizations. The message center can look for keywords present in the message and reply with a text or trigger a workflow. We are currently working on the ability to do text-based surveys in a more automated way using a bot or manual intervention, too.

You will see other improvements on the platform as well, including updated targeting tools, user experience improvements, new filtering and multi-value import features.

On the questionnaire side, we’ve made it even easier and faster to build questionnaires. We’ve added new command types such as ranking, and improved accessibility compliance.

In the security space, we have added native SAML support not just for the participant portal (which was already there) but on the administrative side.

As for recruitment, we’ve added support for time zone settings at the study level and location level.

On the participant side, we have added a feature where participants can now receive and iCAL or Calendar invite to add to their Google calendar, for instance.

The ARCS ecosystem

ARCS is maturing, evolving into a solution for research operations. At the core is the platform our customers have been using all along. Orbiting it is an ecosystem of products that take you beyond panel management, recruitment, and questionnaire building. Let us introduce you to these new products.

Atom

Atom is our insights engine product, our attempt to take insights and drive them into better understandings of how operations work. Access to more data, more reports, more dashboards—all of this is well and good—but you really want these insights to fuel better decision making and growth. Under the Atom umbrella we are introducing three tools. First, a friendly built-in bot to answer questions about ARCS, a self-service analytical module to give better control of data inside ARCS, and multiple partnership agreements to provide enriched data about your panelists: demographic, psychographic, behavioral, updated on a monthly basis.

ARCS Pay

ARCS Pay is our incentive distribution product. It handles rewards management and incentive management and distribution. It offers an improvement over legacy incentive management procedures. With ARCS Pay, you can incentivize any activity in monetary currencies or points—you decide on the right mix. The system can track both. On the distribution side, it lets you select a list of rewards vendors and allows your participants to redeem their own rewards. We have partnered with Tango to provide this piece, all integrated within the ARCS ecosystem in real time. Incentive management becomes an engagement tool now, because you can see what rewards are working and which are not. The setup is configurable, permitting you to try different scenarios. 

Olà a Visitor Management

Olà is our visitor management product, released a few months ago. Our goal was to help customers with in-flow traffic, compliance, quota tracking, and reporting. It includes a receptionist module to ease the check-in and no-show process. Kiosk check-in is available. Text-based check-in is there too. On the compliance side, it supports visitor badge printing, an NDA option, emergency evacuation lists, and audit reporting. On the administrative side there are dashboards and reports to track who is signing up, which quotas are filling and not, whether there are no shows, cancelations, etc.

Coming soon: ARCS cloud and ARCS Survey

ARCS Cloud is a portal for cloud customers.  On the horizon, you’ll be seeing an infrastructure upgrade for our cloud customers. Everything is getting updated: servers, hardware, software. There will be more endpoints across the country that will improve cloud-based performance across our customer base. We are looking to a third-party provider of a more flexible service on the delivery portal, which should improve user experience. Finally, we are working up a new version of ARCS Survey, which should be available by spring 2021. As you can see, we’ve been quite busy! Many of these improvements seen in ARCS stem directly from customer feedback. You have shared real world experiences and needs, and we have responded with more multi-faceted and powerful tools. If you’d like to see the newest enhancements in action, you can view a recorded webinar presented by Srinath Sankar.  And for more information, contact your Marketing Systems Group representative.

From the Desk of Dr. Mansour Fahimi

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Sometimes you lose a relative, or even a friend, but then comes a time when you lose a buddy. Rumi says, “Set your life on fire and seek those who fan your flames.” There are those who douse your fire, but a buddy fans your fire to take your flames to new heights. The MSG family has lost a buddy.

I am sad out of my skull to think that Ashley is no longer with us, but then, I am delighted to have had her in my life as a buddy. She was always there to help me curb my ego to have empathy for others, yet she knew exactly how to rub me the right way so that I would go to the next step because she was good at fanning my fire.

With nearly three decades of impeccable service, Ashley Hyon was an irreplaceable pillar of MSG. She was the source staff would go to for seasoned counsel and solace, which are exactly the reasons why her clients would seek her out. You would go to her with a technical or personal problem, but then walk away forgetting the reason why you craved her companionship in the first place. People skills and the ability to see good in everything and everyone are innate qualities that are not acquirable by reading books or even getting older – you either have it, or you don’t.

I envy the time John and Sophie have had with Ashley all these years. She was not a drop in the ocean, she was the entire ocean in a drop. When I first met her almost 15 years ago, I told our late Dale Kulp that “she’s good.” Dale smiled back and replied, “I know.”

Verbosities aside, life must go on – though at the moment I’m just not sure why.

Welcome Back: Dr. Mansour Fahimi Rejoins MSG

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Surely you know how it feels when someone close to you has to move on. That’s how we felt when our Vice President and leader of our statistical services group, Mansour Fahimi, Ph.D., assumed a new position as Senior Vice President & Chief Statistician position at GfK in 2013. Mansour was like family to us, but we were happy and proud for him and wished him Godspeed.   

Sometimes in life, after a long odyssey, paths will cross again, and there comes a coming home. We in the MSG family are excited that Mansour is rejoining the company. He will hold the position of Executive Vice President and Chief Data Scientist of MSG’s Advanced Analytics and Methods department. Mansour will play a lead role heading MSG’s Online solutions and new methodologies for survey sampling applications in the Digital Age.   

Dr. Fahimi is an internationally recognized research statistician and data scientist, with over three decades of hands-on experience in survey research methods and applications. Throughout his professional tenure Mansour has served as a senior statistician at leading research organizations, such as Westat and RTI, supporting survey projects for the government, commercial, social science, and nonprofit sectors.   

“Mansour is a respected leader and scholar in the field,” says Jeff Palish, Senior Vice President, MSG. “His stellar record of innovations in design and administration of complex surveys for both public and private sector clients speaks for itself. His research into online data collection improvements is nothing less than groundbreaking, particularly the refinements he has developed for selection of nonprobability samples and cutting-edge weighting and calibration methods for samples with coverage limitations.”  

Dr. Fahimi has a vast collection of publication and presentations to his credit. He has served on expert and technical advisory boards for reviewing government surveys.   

“We are thrilled to have him back on board at MSG,” says Jeff, “as our mission now includes providing high-integrity online options to our clients who for decades have been relying on MSG as the leading provider of sampling solutions. Mansour will be responsible for providing strategic vision for improving the inferential integrity of our online sampling product umbrella, with a focus on increasing online market presence, creating high-efficiency project solutions, transitioning survey projects from traditional to online protocols, strengthening MSG’s analytical services, and enhancing our sampling and weighting / calibration offerings.”  

To others in the profession, he is the esteemed Dr. Fahimi. To us, he is also Mansour, a trusted colleague, friend and member of the MSG family. Welcome back, Mansour!