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Welcome to today’s insightful episode of the Data Gurus Podcast! Sima is happy to have Anne Beall, the CEO, and Founder of Beall Research, joining her today!
Anne is a research expert and an author. She has been in the market research industry for over twenty-five years. In this episode, she shares her background, talks about her journey in the world of market research, and explains how emotions influence purchasing.
Market research
Anne got into the market research industry right after graduate school. Soon after, she got recruited to the Boston Consulting Group, where she spent several years in their Chicago office as the head of the market research function.
Beall Research
Anne had lots of ideas but did not have a platform on which to execute them, so she started her own small research firm, Beall Research, nineteen years ago. She started the business alone and then brought eight employees on board.
What Anne loves about research
Anne loves the breadth of the studies her company does. She also loves not knowing how things will work out. She enjoys helping companies figure out what they can do differently and how they could be better.
Selling
Anne’s company is small because she did not want a sales function that pushed the work onto someone else after a sale. She believes that you cannot sell research if you cannot do it, so she wants her senior people to do rather than sell.
A strong pipeline
For Anne, having a strong pipeline comes from reaching out to people, connecting with them, and filling them in on her latest research.
A specialty
Beall Research specializes in how emotions influence purchasing, and they have funded studies to become smarter in that area. They study the internal experience of emotion. Particularly the emotions people feel in relation to brands and how those emotions lead them to purchase the same brand repeatedly.
Two parts
There are two parts to how people’s emotions influence their purchasing decisions. The first part is whether their immediate emotional response to a brand is positive, negative, or neutral. The second part is how much they emotionally identify with a brand. Those two parts go together to create a strong connection.
A frustration
All humans have some kind of emotional response to different things- even tires! It frustrates Anne when brands fail to take advantage of that, and people have a neutral response when brands could easily have created an emotional response.
Memories
The first thing people tend to think about when they think of certain brands is a memory of family and friends.
Strategic Market Research
When business came to a halt in 2007-2008, Anne decided to write a book to keep her sane and give her something to do. She wrote and published the book Strategic Market Research as a marketing piece, and it became an unexpected success. It has been called one of the best books on market research. It gets used in colleges and universities and currently sells about two copies a day on Amazon.
Writing other books
Since then, Anne has written several other books on various topics. She is currently writing her eleventh book on how emotions influence purchasing decisions.
Start writing
Anne encourages anyone considering being an author to do it! It is a lot easier to publish a book now than ever before.
Links:
Email me your thoughts!
Sima@Infinity-2.com
Book: Strategic Market Research: A Guide to Conducting Research that Drives Businesses by Anne Beall
