Thought-leadership in marketing research

In the widely acclaimed book, twice a finalist for the Berry-AMA Book Prize, Counterintuitive Marketing: Achieve Great Results Using Uncommon Sense (with Peter Krieg), New York: The Free Press – A Division of Simon and Schuster (2000), Kevin Clancy and his partner Peter Krieg provided important data on the power of a transformational corporate and brand vision and described a new methodology for attaining this goal. This approach has enabled many companies to develop an aspirational, inspirational vision strategy.

In the same book, Kevin Clancy argued that only 7% to 35% of the buyers in any product category obsess over a low price, while many marketers have promoted their brands as “cheap” “inexpensive,” “on sale,” etc. As a result marketers undersell brands, reinforced by no positioning, leaving money on the table which has lead to the commoditization of American brands and the underperformance of marketing programs. Evidence of this phenomenon can be found in two different published studies of brand commoditization, one of them by Kevin Clancy and Jack Trout in the Harvard Business Review.

In 2003 Kevin Clancy and Dr. Steve Tipps developed and presented at multiple professional conferences the first sophisticated mathematical model of direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing in the pharmaceutical industry, based on third-generation simulation technology. The model enables marketers to forecast likely awareness, prescribing behavior, market share and profitability of DTC campaigns long before their launch. Applications of this model reveal that DTC programs fare no better than packaged goods programs in terms of problematic ROI. This work is published in the book that was previously cited, Market New Products Successfully.

For the past fifteen years Clancy has undertaken a number of studies to explore the role and effects of intuition-based versus fact-based decision making in American corporations. In articles, presentations and three books {cf. the business best-seller Marketing Myths That Are Killing Business: The Cure for Death Wish Marketing (with Robert S. Shulman), New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. (1993)}. Kevin and Copernicus partner Ami Bowen have demonstrated that most marketing managers, men more than women, make marketing decisions based on testosterone and mythology rather than hard facts and knowledge. The result is marketing programs which fail to yield a reasonable return-on-investment.

Not surprisingly, given the dominant influence of intuition based decision making, most marketing programs fall far short of management expectations—a subject of many of Kevin Clancy’s professional presentations and articles dating back to 1978. Clancy was the first marketer in America to talk about this phenomenon. In a recent Harvard Business Review article (written with Randy Stone, CEO of MMA) and book, Your Gut is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head: How Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Growth and Profits (with Peter Krieg), New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons (2007) it is shown that the ROI of most advertising programs is not just zero, but negative. For packaged goods companies it is negative 46%. No wonder a recent Marketing Science Institute study reveals that the average elasticity coefficient for advertising is .01. Most companies would have to double their ad budgets to see a paltry 1% increase in sales.

In addition to faulty decision making, one of the main reasons for negative ROI is Kevin’s discovery that the overwhelming majority of brands lack a compelling positioning, a reason–to–buy. In one Copernicus study of more than 400 prime time television spots, only 7% of brands enjoyed a clear positioning. Clancy’s solution is a pair of novel methodological approaches. The first employs a state-of-the-science three-dimensional approach to measuring buyer motivations. The second uses this data in a Brand Strategy Matrix™ which provides clear guidance for brand positioning decisions. The result is positionings which drive revenue growth by differentiating a client’s brand from competitors on highly motivating dimensions.

In 2003 Kevin Clancy and Professor Paul Berger published work in the Journal of Advertising Research which demonstrated that aggregate level analyses (such as gap analysis, traditional media analysis, etc.) lead to the right conclusions only by accident. Since aggregate level analyses are commonplace in marketing research today, their findings have important implications. Basically, what they suggest is that such analyses lead to faulty marketing decisions which hinder marketing performance.

In 2005, Kevin J Clancy presented the first paper at a professional conference which demonstrated the pitfalls of “derived importance measures,” another common approach in market research today. Clancy's work shows that derived importance measures rarely discover the true underlying factors which drive brand choice. Researchers who use them run the dangerous risk of leading marketers in the wrong direction. This work will be published in 2009.

In the same year, Kevin and his partner Henry Gamse developed a 289-item best practices auditing tool for evaluating market segmentation and targeting decisions. The results of this audit enable a marketer to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their segmentation practices compared to world class standards.

Recently, Kevin J. Clancy has been writing and speaking about Six Sigma applications in marketing. Although most Six Sigma work is tactical in nature, Kevin has been the first researcher to show that Two and Three Sigma strategies (targeting, positioning and advertising), never mind Six Sigma, have a dramatic effect on revenues and profitability and should be, as a consequence, relentlessly pursued.

For two decades many research firms and marketers have made strategic decisions using models based on “derived importance measures,” which has been shown to be a problematic methodology. In early 2009, Clancy and his partners at Copernicus introduced a new positioning simulation model fed by data from a strategy study which does not rely on correlation analysis at all. The model enables a marketer to forecast the likely performance of new positioning, product or loyalty strategies grounded in different combinations of 10-50 attributes and benefits of a product or service. Fueled by a state-of-the-science multi-attribute measurement methodology co-developed by Kevin Clancy and Professor Paul Berger, the new model overcomes classic statistical problems associated with conventional methodologies, to yield new strategies to improve market share performance and brand profitability.

For his accomplishments and contributions, Kevin was elected into the Market Research Hall of Fame in 2008, an award given to only one practicing member of the profession each year. He joins the ranks of Alvin Achenbaum, Ernest Dichter, Arthur Nielsen Sr., George Gallup, David Ogilvy, Elmo Roper and Dan Yankelovich. This award has been given annually since 1927 by the Market Research Council, a group of 80 leading authorities in the marketing community.