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View AllShould I switch plans to keep my doctor? Every open enrollment season, many employees face a deceptively simple question: should I choose the plan that looks better on paper, or the one that lets me keep my doctor? Employer-provided health insurance...
Findings from healthcare market research study from TRC, using AI-moderated qualitative interviews. AI adoption in healthcare is accelerating, but what consumers actually trust isn’t always obvious. To better understand where confidence holds and ...
As the most-watched tournament in the world kicks off, here’s the real question: “What can FIFA World Cup prediction models teach us about making better business decisions?” Every four years – and as Team USA set off on their quest for ...
Recently, two of my sons (10 and 12 year old boys) discovered AriZona Iced Tea. When I was a young buck, in the 1990s, AriZona Iced Tea had just launched and it was very popular. I was also a big fan around that same age. I was quite surprised whe...
As someone who works in market research, I was struck by how closely the skills she had to develop mirror what we do every day.
I grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a place where "running to the doctor" could mean a 60-minute drive on a good-weather day. For many rural Americans, that reality hasn't changed. In fact, it's getting worse. As someone who has spent her career...
Yes, AI chatbots can conduct qualitative interviews. In a recent TRC Insights pilot using AI-Moderated Interviews for fintech consumer research, the AI led natural-feeling, structured conversations and delivered a positive respondent experience. A f...
Engaged. Curious. Sharp. Thoughtful. And, as a bonus, not at all bothered by having to show up on a Saturday. Those are the words I'd use to describe the students I met this past weekend at AMA Baltimore's 2026 Collegiate Career Connections Workshop:...
Evolving Your Brand Tracker Without Losing the Plot: Guidelines for Seamless Transitions If your market has moved on but your tracker hasn’t, you’re not alone. The following outlines how to modernize your brand‑tracking program - whether switc...
Pricing research is critical for companies evaluating price increases, new product launches, or revenue optimization. This article explains how monadic split-cell pricing research works, why it produces clean price sensitivity insights, and when it i...
Problem Context At TRC, we are committed to exploring innovative approaches to market‑research challenges. This post offers a fresh perspective on leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Copilot—not just as answer engines, but a...
Hospitals and health systems are facing growing pressure to justify what they charge. Price transparency requirements have made healthcare prices publicly visible, increasing scrutiny from insurers and consumers. Recent reporting has questioned wh...
As anyone with experience with pets will tell you, no two are alike...
Rivalries make football memorable — and they reminded me why personas, whether in AI or research, are about perspective, not perfection. Rivalries & Passion There’s an old Woody Hayes quote — maybe apocryphal, but legendary all the same...
Before Bob could have rivals, I had to look back at how he came to life in the first place — and what that taught me about building personalities. Before the Rivals… Back to the Beginning The last article ended with Coach Bob on the field, ca...
Coach Bob’s draft class of synthetic players reminded me of something I see in research: when used responsibly, synthetic data doesn’t make things less real — it makes them more human. Why Rules Alone Can’t Create Realism By this point, Coa...
When Bob needed to call plays, I learned that sometimes the best AI isn’t the flashiest — it’s the one that delivers consistent results. From Avatar to Coach In the first article, I shared how Bob began as a GenAI-driven avatar with personali...
A personal AI avatar project took an unexpected turn into football — and ended up teaching me lessons I now use every day in research. From Bob to Coach Bob The Building Bob project began as a personal endeavor — part curiosity, part fun. He st...
For immediate release January 2, 2026, Fort Washington, PA: Philadelphia-based market research firm, TRC Insights, has once again pursued the rigorous process of ensuring a HITRUST Certification for the next two years, proving they are equipped and ...
What We Found – Primary Research from 2025 Study 38% of consumers noticed a credit card surcharge on a purchase in the past 3 months. Males were more likely to notice the fee: 44% vs. 33% of females. Younger adults (25–34) were most aware: 49%...
The Insights industry is finally having its Jurassic Park moment – and I’m loving it! As Ian Malcolm famously warned in the film: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. T...
At the ARF/MSI panel on synthetic data I was asked by Oded Netzer, (Professor of Marketing at Columbia Business School) where we will be in 5-10 years. My simple answer was that AI is a paradigm shift. What we are witnessing is the beginning. Some...
Over the past few years, retailers have started adding a 2–4% “surcharge” to common purchases when the buyer uses a credit card to pay. I started noticing this 2–3 years ago at small shops, coffee spots, and local restaurants. Today, it’s b...
Introduction In the rapidly evolving world of marketing, understanding consumer behavior is pivotal to success. As businesses strive to cater to diverse consumer needs, segmentation becomes essential. Let’s explore the concept of needs-based segme...
Online panels and communities have become a cornerstone of research, offering a continuous stream of rich insights in real time. While they require thoughtful planning and upfront investment, they can deliver valuable benefits that include agile insi...
Constant Sum Allocation Can Provide More Insight into Customer Preferences In March 2025 , TRC partnered with The Center for Customer-Based Execution and Strategy (C-CUBES) at Rice University to field a study designed to understand the value drivers...
Introduction Since the early days of online surveys in the late 1990s, data quality has been under constant attack. It’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse between fraudsters (or bots) trying to game the system and research companies trying to s...
In the early 2000s, a transformative market research technique emerged that has since revolutionized how companies gather feedback: online communities. These digital forums have evolved to provide more immersive and often more economical ways of coll...
My family is going to Disney for the first time in June. Shh! My kids don’t know yet. The thought of planning a trip was overwhelming. I’ve never been there, and hearing others talk of their Disney trips I know it requires a lot of preparation. T...
Silos: Barriers to Collaboration Silos. Good for farms, bad for companies. When disciplines or departments stay siloed, the organization as a whole may suffer from lack of collaboration, ideation, and growth. In particular, think about a company’s...
Innovation must be shiny, fancy, and new. Ha, says who? Because I beg to differ. Remember that scene from the movie Hidden Figures (Spoiler alert! But c’mon, it is an 8-year old movie) when Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson) discover...
Price Is (Still) King — But Context Is Crucial I’m not going to say to ignore price lest my market researcher card be revoked. Price is clearly a core driver of consumer choice. It consistently ranks at the top in importance across 1000s of conj...
Introduction: Why Are Products Changing? If you’ve recently noticed your favorite snack bag seems lighter, or your go-to shampoo now comes in a smaller bottle but with flashier branding and a higher price, you’re not imagining things. These are ...
A New Twist on MaxDiff Changes the Way We Think about Pricing In the realm of marketing research, identifying effective pricing strategies is a critical piece of consumer insights. Business leaders need to answer essential pricing questions: What ...
If you've been in the pricing research business for a while, you've probably heard this concern: "How do I set prices if I don't know what prices to test?" It's a legitimate question. Picture this: you're starting a conjoint study and ask stakeholder...
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are useful for tracking how a brand or its products are perceived over time and against competitors. Companies may do their own research to track these metrics or utilize the benchmarking services of outside organiza...
At TRC, we provide custom insights for all types of companies needing guidance. From those that create leashes for dogs to those that have developed software to facilitate genomic sequencing. There are industries TRC has a preponderance of knowledge ...
Health, of course, is of paramount importance. But in today’s economic context health insurance seems nearly as important. Can the importance of health insurance be statistically demonstrated? We’ll present three examples from Yale researchers th...
So, you’ve decided you need marketing research—but with so many companies out there, how do you choose the right one? Instead of guessing, let’s start with a few key questions. Your answers will help you narrow down the options and find the res...
Discover the impact of shrinkflation on consumer perception and brand trust. Learn how businesses navigate rising costs while maintaining profitability, and explore strategies to balance transparency and customer loyalty. TRC Insights provides expert...
Unlock profitability with Price Sensitivity Analysis. Learn how businesses optimize pricing strategies using data-driven techniques like Van Westendorp, Conjoint Analysis, and Gabor-Granger. Discover how TRC Insights helps brands navigate inflation, ...
Are you a sports fan? Super Bowl 2025. Kansas City Chiefs going for the 3-peat. Favored to beat the Philadelphia Eagles. And that’s because all the statistics showed the Chiefs were superior in so many ways so they should win. Right? Of 10 crit...
Inspiring. Insightful. Challenging. Thought-provoking. Daunting. Encouraging. These are just some of the words I’ve heard spoken by others to encapsulate the experience of attending this year’s Analytics & Insights Summit hosted by Sawtooth ...
While those steps are all critical to a strong, long-term segmentation solution, a faster, leaner version is the best bet now.
What do driving, chess, and market research all have in common? No, this isn’t the beginning of a silly joke (though if you come up with a punchline, I’d love to hear it). The answer is anticipation; in order to excel in all three, anticipation i...
When I was 24 years old, I became one of the founders of a new market research company. At that time, I’d only been in research for four years. Young, naïve, and with little to lose, I enthusiastically jumped in. It never occurred to me that I’d...
From a personal and professional perspective, this was a great year! We added new clients and new projects After the challenges of the pandemic, and recovery from it, 2023 felt for me to be a much more normal year. TRC realized its greatest growth ...
If you’re in market research and you’re working the business-to-business category, you’ll likely be asked to help with market expansion—finding new customers and identifying opportunities for profitability. The most obvious market research so...
Have you heard anything about AI recently? If you have not, feel free to skip this article and return your head to the sand. Personally, I’ve read a ton of fresh articles about the arrival of AI, how it's poised to change the world, and not just...
As market researchers we have an array of tools available to help companies get market input on pricing their products and services. Rajan Sambandam lays out a number of options based on elicitation method and where you are in the development cycle. ...
I’ve been thinking about pricing research lately and how far it's come from the days of simply asking people what they'd pay for something. From Gabor-Granger laddering to Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitivity Meter to Discrete Choice Conjoint model...
In research, the gold standard method for testing price points is through monadic design. But that method requires a large number of participants, and sometimes we don’t have that luxury. (See Rajan Sambandam's White Paper - Monadic Price Testing v...
Does anyone love international money transfers? Allow me to explain based on my own experience and using better informed sources (such as James Revell – see End Notes). Given that more than half of non-governmental international money transfers...
Imagine this scenario: There are three countries, say A, B, C, that have their own versions of road systems. In Country A, roads are completely owned by private entities. They are aplenty and of varying quality – but road switching generates a tr...
Here are 4 examples of green marketing for companies that helped make a difference in their industries.
For years our clients in the energy sector have been innovating ways to make energy production and distribution more sustainable and encouraging their customers to engage in green practices when it comes to making choices about the ways they consume ...
Recently, Harvard Business Review featured an article about TRC Insights study conducted for PayPal. We are proud to share how the study results influenced PayPal's global expansion strategy for their "Buy Now Pay Later" (BNPL) product.
We are proud to announce that TRC's own Elliot Savitzky, SVP, along with our client Hannah Robbins, CMO at SPRUCE HAVEN FARM presented at the MRMW Merlien market research conference in Atlanta, June 15th. They also presented the case study at the Qui...
Learn more about creating optimal Fintech market research surveys with our online survey tips like adding definitions and pre-tests.
As you may be aware, academia is currently wresting with a “replication crisis” — a paper is published with stunning findings, gets lots of attention, and then when other academics try to duplicate the results they get a very different answer. ...
I’ve always been proud of the team we have at TRC, and I love that I get to work with such talented, thoughtful, driven people. I’m proud that we’ve been chosen consistently for the GRIT list of innovative research firms, our HITRUST Certificat...
I read an article in the NY Times about the fable of the buggy whip manufacturer. We were all taught in business school that buggy whip companies were wiped out by the auto industry. Had they only seen themselves as part of the transportation industr...
A bit of history The first insurance company founded in the US was called The Friendly Society, in Charleston, SC, back in 1735. Today, there are 32 insurance companies in the Fortune 500 alone, none of which has a higher market share than 22% [1] f...
We at TRC conduct a lot of choice-based research, with the goal of aligning our studies with real-world decision-making...
So much has been written about conducting research for new product development. Not surprisingly...
We are living in very volatile times full of huge concerns about our health, the economy, social justice, a coming election.
Discrete Choice Conjoint is a powerful tool for, among other things, conducting pricing and product development research.
I read an interesting article about design elements that no longer serve a purpose, but continue to exist.
I grew up in a family that always seemed to be on the hunt for a good sale.
We love Max-Diff! It is the industry gold standard for feature prioritization, and with good reason.
Folks isolating at home during the COVID-19 pandemic...
In market research, a single image may communicate far more than a single word.
Many of our clients ask for our help with feature prioritization as part of the product development cycle. This typically involves using...
Every winter one of my co-workers at TRC reminds us that Girl Scout Cookie Season is upon us. GSCS (my abbreviation) is a time to call attention to, celebrate and support the agency dedicated to building “girls of courage, confidence, and characte...
Why choose one technique over the other? There are many reasons, but here are a few...
Last week I was watching the CBS morning news and they had a story about a new study that indicated that your attitude toward gym class as a child shaped your attitude toward exercise your entire life. After watching the story I am convinced that i...
I’ve written many times about the importance of “knowing where your data has been”. The most advanced discrete choice conjoint, segmentation or regression is only as good as the data it relies on.
Do people buy green products? Yes, of course. The real question for green marketers is whether they buy enough. In other words, are green sales in line with pro-green attitudes?
At the beginning of my research career I grew accustomed to clients asking us for proposals using a methodology that they had pre-selected...
In today’s fast paced, high stakes business environment, where budgets are tighter than ever, finding the time and dedicating the resources needed for generating breakthrough product ideas can be very challenging. Many companies we’ve worked with...
My friend and I don’t share the same definition of what it means to be on-time. I don’t necessarily subscribe to the “early is on-time, on-time is late, late is unacceptable” theory, but I do try to arrive at or before an agreed upon time. Sh...
If you open your mailbox today, chances are that there will be a catalog in it. Even with the explosion in online purchasing, paper catalogs continue to be an important part of the retail marketing mix. Whether they spur traditional mail- or telephon...
About a decade ago, if someone would have mentioned the words "mobile app", anyone would have looked at them with a very puzzled expression. Nowadays, we hear about these apps everywhere. There are commercials for them on television, ads in magazines...
When working with clients on parameters for a conjoint design, there is often an assumption that the design includes a current product configuration, or base case.
During my recent first time home buying experience I learned there are many, often competing, factors to consider. My last blog discussed how I used Bracket™, a tournament-based analytic approach, to determine what homebuyers find most important wh...
The weather is starting to warm up and more of us are venturing outside, myself included.
A recent post on my Facebook timeline boasted that Lansdale Farmers Market was voted the Best of Montgomery County, PA two years in a row. That’s the market I patronize, and I’d like to feel a bit of pride for it. But I’m a researcher and I kno...
Some months ago, Lily Allen mistakenly received an email containing harsh test group feedback regarding her new album. Select audience members believed the singer to be retired and threw in some comments that I won’t quote. If you are curious, the ...
Rita’s Italian Ice is a Pennsylvania-based company that sells its icy treats through franchise locations on the East Coast and several states in the Midwest and West. Every year on the first day of spring, Rita’s gives away full-size Italian ...
Apple is suing Samsung for alleged patent infringements that relate to features of the iphone and ipad. The damages claimed by Apple? North of 2 billion dollars. The obvious question is how Apple came up with those numbers?
I read an article about the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. This is the so called "God Particle" which explains why matter has mass. While the science generally is beyond me, I was intrigued by something one of the physicists said: Scientists ...
A Segmentation Research Example A few months ago I posted that we researched 18 factors in deciding which movie to see and where to see it. We reported that “It’s in 3D” was at the bottom of the list, and concluded that 3-D was unlikely to sav...
The Nobel Prize winner and the intellectual godfather of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, has summarized a lifetime of research in his book Thinking, Fast & Slow.
Yes, I admit it. This is a self-serving post. But when compelling research crosses one’s eyes, one is forced to write a blog post. In this case the compelling research comes from Natalie Mizik under the intriguing title of “The Theory and Practic...
Technology is simply brilliant! If I didn’t already embrace that fact...
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