Quick.  Your customers are telling stories.


How will they affect your marketing strategy?

Narrative Research Services from Shore can turn customer stories into actionable intelligence now. And later.

	Get rapid, unbiased market insights that traditional market research can't deliver
	Benefit from sophisticated analysis tools that reveal hidden patterns
	Learn techniques that your management team can use again and again for new insights

A  new technique that helps you to find unanticipated trends in markets.

In typical market research, you test an idea or hypothesis that you've formed to see what people think of it. This is useful if you have a good sense as to what you'll do with their opinions. But the ongoing problem with this type of market research is that you may be asking people for opinions about topics that aren't really their key motivators.  Your own ideas may be getting in the way of understanding your market's ideas - and keeping you from identifying unanticipated key trends before your competitors do.

Narrative Research Services from Shore Communications Inc. can help you to break out from the inherent bias of traditional research methods to listen to the real stories that your customers and prospects want to tell. Instead of interviewing people or having them answer surveys based on pre-formed questions, narrative research enables people to choose from possible stories that they can tell about key activities relating to your markets. The people who write these short narratives then provide additional information that helps Shore to analyze them using sophisticated software to identify patterns in the stories. This technique, first developed for analyzing surveillance information gathered by the U.S. intelligence community, can help to turn your market's seemingly random "chatter" into powerful and actionable insights.

When is Narrative Research Most Valuable?

When conducting open-ended investigations of new market trends, sectors and conditions On an ongoing basis to track trends in customer attitudes cost-effectively Before introducing major qualitative or quantitative studies

Being able to correlate the patterns found in story analysis with the rich information found in the narratives can reveal motivations, concerns and priorities that would be nearly impossible to detect with traditional hypothesis-testing research methods. Instead of guessing what trends in markets might be, you can discover far more easily what those real trends are and how they correlate with key buying behaviors. Best of all, since the suggested stories are easily collected again over any period of time, you can field narrative research studies multiple times very cost-effectively to understand how stories continue to change.

Analysis that keeps you from paralysis.

Narrative research studies from Shore work most successfully when we are able to collect dozens of stories that enable our software to detect specific patterns in people's responses. Some of these patterns can be represented graphically, such as seen in the chart to the right. When people's stories fit key patterns, they tend to "cluster" in these graphical representations. The density and overall trending of these clusters are important visual cues that enable you to review the stories that are most indicative of key trends. You can come back to these stories and analysis tools again and again to try out new ideas and hypotheses to see how they correlate against this unbiased source of information for meaningful insights and patterns. This ability to test possible conclusions rapidly can lead to far more effective strategic decision-making without having to wait for the results of new research efforts. It can also lead to traditional research that's much more in tune with specific qualitative and quantitative questions that you need answered. Your decision-making can move on rapidly and continue to reference meaningful, unbiased market insights from narrative research

Give your management team "hands on" market insights.

While Shore analysts can do the heavy lifting on designing, compiling and delivering narrative research, our experience shows that you'll get the most out of it when you get your management team "hands on" with the stories that your customers are telling. Shore will facilitate on-site, confidential discussions with your management team as a part of our Narrative Research Services. These on-site facilitated workshops can help your team to understand and discuss the patterns being revealed in stories in ways that lead to real decisions about market strategy far more rapidly. The objective framework provided for these stories help people to come together to discuss important market trends with less need to defend their own points of view. Often the outcomes of these facilitated discussions are at least as valuable as the research itself. And once you have the research, it can be used again for new workshops to examine new ideas and trends. It's a new way to bring your team together for effective results.

Use your own market contacts to gain market insights, or share them.

Shore has completed successful private narrative research projects for leading corporations that help them to get confidential insights into their markets. We also conduct narrative research projects that benefit trade associations such as the Software and Information Industry Association and Special Libraries Association and can conduct these studies on a syndicated basis also. However you first use narrative research, it's easy to combine pre-existing data to which you're entitled from a narrative research study with new data to gain amplified insights into your marketplace. You can even harvest information from Web sources such as social media services to gain leading insights.

Shore will work with you to find the right combination of narrative research data and services for your specific marketing requirements, including analysis of how it can best complement existing or new traditional research efforts. Please contact us today to learn more about how Shore Narrative Research Services can change your view of your marketplace soon.

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