CMI - Brief Overview

Company Description

CMI is a rapidly growing, full-service marketing research company that provides clients with strategic and tactical marketing insights. Its consultative approach helps clients gain an in-depth understanding of how to align their products, services and strategies with their respective customers’ needs. As a trusted advisor to Fortune 1000 companies in a wide range of industries, CMI’s personalized approach goes beyond providing static marketing data and reports. Instead, each project team, comprised of experienced professionals, creates a learning environment with its client in which team members develop in-depth knowledge of the client organization, its tactical issues, its strategic needs, and the competitive environment in which it operates. Combining this knowledge with its research findings, the CMI team is able to translate information into actionable recommendations that drive company initiatives and bottom line profitability.

CMI capabilities encompass the full range of marketing research and analytical services – qualitative and quantitative – customized to meet the unique requirements of each project. Research projects conducted range from one-time ad hoc studies to ongoing programs for improving the customer experience process, to launching new products and services. CMI studies address a broad scope of marketing issues such as advertising effectiveness, channel management, pricing, satisfaction/value, win/loss analysis, branding, new product development, customer retention management, and customer segmentation. In a typical year, CMI completes more than 200 projects, conducts more than half a million interviews via telephone, mail, the Internet and in person, and produces more than 2,000 reports.

Year Founded

1989 (as ConsumerMetrics, Inc.; dba CMI since 2002)

Revenues

$13 million+ in 2007

Employees

50+

Locations

Atlanta (headquarters)
Long Island, New York (satellite office)
Cedar Rapids, Iowa (satellite office)Denver (satellite office)

Markets Served

CMI is a consultant to a wide array of Fortune 1000 companies, although the heaviest concentration is in industries such as energy utilities, food services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, financial services, insurance, hospitality and travel, telecommunications, and manufacturing/B2B.

Capabilities

CMI offers a complete range of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, web-based research capabilities and multivariate techniques. Some interesting and less common methodologies and techniques include:

Ethnographic Research – With roots in cultural anthropology, ethnographic research, when applied to marketing, is a qualitative research method characterized by observation. When CMI undertakes an ethnographic research study, a team member observes a participant in his or her environment to understand what motivates behavior and what goes into a decision-making process. The purpose is to provide a detailed, in-depth description that will help identify customers’ needs. In ethnographic research, questions are asked at the conclusion of the process to link actual behaviors with underlying motivations.
Facilitation – Facilitation, another qualitative research methodology, brings together a cross-functional group of individuals from within a client organization for the purpose of determining the best way to implement the results of a research study. A professionally trained CMI facilitator leads the session – typically a ½-day to full-day – and uses a variety of techniques to help align the team around one or more company goals or initiatives.
Multivariate Techniques - CMI’s marketing science team understands that statistics is a means to an end, and focuses on how to best translate the scientific results into business implications. The marketing science team at CMI uses a broad range of statistical modeling and analytic techniques that examine quantitative data in more depth than typically can be obtained from basic cross tabulations. Using techniques such as TURF analysis, conjoint analysis, choice-based modeling, structural equation modeling, and latent class analysis, CMI provides its clients with a variety of sophisticated insights that include: understanding a customer’s decision process, estimating the share of a new product offering, projecting the revenue impact for product modifications, and understanding the ROI for improvements in the customer experience process.

Custom Products

CMI’s Web Insights Navigator^SM (WIN) embodies the company’s philosophy of providing clients with a competitive advantage by designing custom web portals that provide a more intimate understanding of their customers’/clients’ needs to all levels of the organization. The password-protected, web system is designed for easy use by all levels of an organization’s management and all functional areas that touch its customers. Providing quick access to insights from CMI studies as well as other sources, the system answers questions such as: How well are we performing? What actions do we need to take to improve the customer experience? What are our customers/accounts saying? And why are customer/accounts at risk? The system allows users to download their information directly into PowerPoint for customized presentations. The Web Insights Navigator is ideally suited for organizations that have various customer touch points and want to improve the customer experience process in a consistent, focused manner.

QTabs^SM is an interactive web-based product that gives CMI’s clients 24/7 access to their survey data via the Internet, and more important, allows them to create a customized set of cross-tabulations that will help answer questions outside the scope of a research study’s cross-tabulations or report. For example, a research report on a new product concept may have categorized an age group from 19-25 and from 26-35, but the client organization’s brand manager may want to see the results of respondents ages 22-30 to follow up on a hunch that the product could be best suited to that age group. With QTabs, the answer is immediately available.

Senior Management

Chet Zalesky, president and founder; member of the CMI steering committee
Mike Gray, senior vice president of marketing
Laura Caraway, vice president of operations; member of the CMI steering committee
Ellen Mowbray, vice president of sales and marketing; member of the CMI steering committee
Janet Ziffer, vice president of client services
Christina Liao, leader, marketing science group

Awards

Catalyst magazine’s 2006 Top 50 Entrepreneurs Portfolio (awarded to Chet Zalesky)
MetLife 2005 Supplier of the Year

Web Site

www.cmiresearch.com

Media Contacts

Ann Kohut
Kohut Communications Consulting
770-913-9747
annielk@bellsouth.net
or
Angela Mattoon
CMI
678-805-4000
amattoon@cmiresearch.com

January 2008