In a ceremony held in Beverly Hills California on September 19, The American Marketing Association presented the award to Tony Bowden who accepted it on behalf of his team, which included: Mitra Asilzadeh (SPSS), John McConnell (SigDiff), Mike Woods (MarketStream), Mario Menti (SPSS), Heena Jethwa (SPSS), Alex Dibble (Stickee), The VoxPops team, The Fuse Team. The award was in recognition of their outstanding work in developing an innovative marketing survey for the Danby Springs Mineral Water company and SPSS.
Danby, a small independent producer of natural mineral waters. Danby had already enlisted the help of SPSS of the United Kingdom. The approach, designed by Mr. Bowden, was to apply a new marketing methodology called "The Four Pillars of Insight".
The first 'pillar' is an online survey of customer needs. Secondly, A "voice of the customers" - a series of in depth video interviews were produced in which potential customers commented on aspects of price, quality and flavour of the Danby Springs Mineral Water. After this, a "voice of the product" survey was done to determine the optimal bottle design. Lastly, A statistical analysis was carried out to determine the buying behaviour of potential customers.
The project used mrStream as a content management platform, and used the Espresso for Schools curriculum network to conduct the online survey as a satellite based online research panel. The "Four Pillars" methodology is designed to give greater insight into consumer attitudes and behaviour, to support new product design and development. This is a more extensive method than the commonly used techniques and technologies used by most marketing agencies and their clients.
The project required a two-way satellite link. Data is first collected and stored in a central archive and then distributed to users according to various themes. The return channel is implemented via DVB-RCS.
The advantage to marketing companies and the reason Mr. Bowden received this prestigious award, is that digital assets in the form of: survey results, tables, video and other marketing information can be better integrated and accessed from the end-user's desktop through an ordinary browser interface.
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