Proprietary Products

RTi makes available an impressive selection of proprietary products — original offerings developed by the RTi team, to uniquely address our clients’ needs.

Here is a sampling of our most popular products, many of which are trademarked, that our clients use to support their achievement of business objectives:

Construction Test®

Construction Test® is a product development tool used to identify optimal combinations of product or service components.

Traditionally, consumer testing of the various components of new products and services (such as name, package, and label) is handled sequentially and independently. However, beyond the major drawbacks of time and expense, sequential testing does not always take into account the way in which the product components “interact.” For example, when the “best name” is combined with the previously identified “best label” and “best container,” the result may not be the best overall combination of product components. Consider the choices you make when selecting your daily wardrobe: while your favorite blouse, trousers, shoes, tie and hat may stand out individually, they may not work in combination to complete an appealing ensemble.

RTi’s own Construction Test® is designed to overcome these shortcomings of capability and timeliness.

Based on our proprietary model, RTi’s Construction Test® analyzes the product and services data generated from a series of targeted questions. Unlike other analyses, Construction Test establishes the relationship between each respondent’s monadic ratings and his/her preferred product bundle, and generates a score for every possible product component combination. This approach accomplishes two important outcomes: it identifies the most appealing product bundle and, equally importantly, it allows the manufacturer or service provider to trade-off alternative components based on factors such as availability of the preferred name, cost of materials and so forth.

Construction Test® identifies which combinations of alternatives for each component fit together best, generating the greatest product appeal. Moreover, if circumstances change and a name or product feature, etc., must be eliminated, this approach identifies the next best alternative.

Screen Play®

After a quantitative screening of ideas, concepts, or benefits, Screen Play® provides an easy and powerful way to consider these multiple opportunities and determine which make up the optimal set.

Screen Play® is extremely simple to use, yet provides extremely powerful results. RTi provides an Excel® spreadsheet containing the needed research data from all the ideas, concepts and benefits tested. To determine the “penetration” of any combination of benefits, the user simply types a “1” next to each benefit to be included in the offering. The program calculates and shows the penetration based on the combination of benefits chosen. Penetration can be defined a number of ways and is customized to the study objectives.

With RTi’s Screen Play®, you can quickly and efficiently screen concepts for product development, product promotion and new services. And you can play out “what if” scenarios, right from your own desktop.

Screen Play® can help you answer questions like these:

BrandStar®

Our BrandStar® model, more than anything else, is a structured way to think about your brand — it is the roadmap providing direction for all other marketing elements. At RTi, we use the BrandStar® model as a basis of facilitated strategic brand development sessions with our clients and as a foundation of our own thinking about our clients’ brands.

Your brand is an intricate relationship among many different factors and attributes. RTi’s BrandStar® model provides structure to piecing together these elements and developing a coherent Brand Strategy. Establishing a Brand Strategy is imperative, as it explicitly defines the strategic direction for all tactical marketing decisions that follow.

In most cases, developing a BrandStar® Brand Strategy is a two-step process. First, RTi works in partnership with our clients to develop a hypothesized BrandStar® model, to understand all brand elements, as defined by the customer. Then, we conduct our primary research to revise and confirm the hypothesized BrandStar® strategy. The confirmed BrandStar is now the foundation for our customers to clearly communicate their Brand Strategy.

At RTi, we use the agreed-upon Brand Strategy to drive our research design and to ensure actionable and relevant recommendations for every project.

BrandMark — Suite of Branding Services for the Pharmaceutical Industry

RTi is a principle provider of effective Branding research to the pharmaceutical industry. We offer the BrandMark suite of branding services, which was designed by RTi to build on your Brand Strategy.

Market Structure Exploration

In preparation for Positioning and Naming — critical elements of the branding process — patient presentation, treatment protocol and perceptions of opportunities are first explored through interviews conducted by RTi Key Medical Advisors. Then, by utilizing our unique qualitative processes, we identify target physician perceptions, patient population opportunities and competitive brand weaknesses, among other key branding criteria.

The RTi process utilizes Ideal Delineation and perceptual mapping to determine competitive brand vulnerability. This service provides key learning about the Market Structure, Market Target and User Benefits.

Positioning Optimization and Testing

At RTi, we specialize in determining the optimum market position for your brand. To decide upon the most powerful way in which to communicate a new product’s “Primary Point of Difference,” we call on our expertise by utilizing a series of iterative qualitative and quantitative methods. We first qualitatively identify and optimize the brand, and then assess the potential market opportunity of one or more product positionings by quantitatively measuring key market share and “Source of Business” data.

Further, our unique, yet proven computer-based interview allows us to accurately “drill down” to measure physician responses to brand positionings, by effectively analyzing and interpreting a physician’s scripting behavior, at a very detailed level. Results are reported in terms of scripting share for the new drug or indication.

Brand Name Development and Testing

To ensure our clients and their brands achieve “maximum impact,” RTi has developed a new category of brand names, Relational Asemantics, which our staff designed to relate to the market targets’ desires, as well as adhere to the strict standards set by World Wide Trademarking.

Brand names are developed and evaluated through a series of “Creative Sessions” with market target respondents and then quantitatively tested using our unique, in-person interviewing methodology to determine the strongest brand names on multiple factors. These “brand name leaders” are then evaluated against our Normative Data Base in the U.S. and worldwide to determine name perception and acceptance.

QualmarkSM Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Program

To help our clients succeed through maximizing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, RTi developed the QualmarkSM Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research Program. The QualmarkSM program emphasizes a customized, model-based approach to measuring, enhancing, and tracking satisfaction and loyalty. While each program differs depending upon individual research requirements, the following goals guide each customer satisfaction initiative:

The QualmarkSM program is an iterative process, comprised of four phases, each building on one another to provide actionable learning on your investment in customer care:

Define
We start with an internal assessment with key stakeholders within the organization to identify the vision for the underlying corporate satisfaction and loyalty program, defining the “moments of truth” and their perception of the ideal customer experience.
Measure
The insights gained from stakeholders provide the basis to construct satisfaction model which in turn is the foundation for the survey instrument.
Analyze
Our analysis and reporting is focused on prioritizing the factors that drive satisfaction and loyalty. To that end, we have developed multivariate measures and models, such as our Satisfaction Segmentation analysis and Predictive Impact Modeling that drill down to uncover the aspects of the customer experience that must be focused on. Further, by combining our unique analytics with operational data, QualmarkSM can provide approximate ROIs on recommended actions.
Validate
Your customers are dynamic, therefore, so must your efforts be at retaining them. It is imperative to reassess your customer perceptions on a regular basis and use that learning to measure process improvement as well as to fine-tune the satisfaction model based on a constantly changing environment.

The QualmarkSM program extends beyond research. RTi can work with you to help define the actions that will improve those aspects of service having the largest influence on your customers’ overall satisfaction and loyalty.

RTi has been successfully applying the QualmarkSM program and ideals to satisfaction and loyalty research across all stages of the customer relationship and all points of contact for more than ten years.

Pathways

The struggle in research design has always been between a quantitative and qualitative approach, and deciding which solution to apply to a particular business case. Both options fill specific research needs: quantitative research provides projectable and representative samples, while qualitative research provides the in-depth understanding marketers require. The problem, however, is that researchers have traditionally had to choose between statistically valid sampling with minimum in-depth learning or in-depth learning with only directional confidence.

RTi’s Pathways approach bridges the gap between quantitative and qualitative research. Using audience response technology, quantitative testing and qualitative research can be combined into a single two-hour session. In each session:

The technique is infinitely flexible allowing any form of visual stimulus, including video, audio or Web sites, and can be conducted anywhere or anytime. In addition, the technique allows any type of questioning and a variety of traditional and advanced analytic options.

The benefits of this technique include:

RTi has used this technique with great impact among both business and consumer audiences in the following areas:

PowerBrand™

Power Brands are brands that are superior to competitors’ and are likely to engender greater loyalty and increased selection and purchase regardless of price and promotion. Simply put, a Power Brand is what all brands aspire to be.

But, how do you know whether your brand is a Power Brand? What is it specifically about a brand — in definable, tangible terms — that makes it a Power Brand?

Power Brands are superior in their category on five dimensions: Differentiation, Esteem, Customer Satisfaction, Aspiration Match, and Extension Lift (used for co-branding/line extension).

RTi, in cooperation and partnership with Harry Heller of the Heller Research Agency offers the Power Brand Study: category specific, strategic custom research to identify the ways in which a company can improve its brand relative to other brands in the category. In short, research designed to provide actionable recommendations on how to achieve Power Brand status for your brand.

The Power Brand study is a large scale study encompassing all major brands within the category. For each of the included brands, we create the following indices using a composite of specific, researchable measures:

Differentiation Index
consumer perceptions of the brand’s uniqueness
Esteem Index
define consumer attitudes toward the brand
Satisfaction Index
brand user satisfaction with product and/or service as well as customer loyalty
Aspiration Index
degree to which each respondent’s self definition of importance of category product or service characteristics match their perceptions of each brand’s delivery of these characteristics
Extension/Lift Index
the strength of the brand as a co-branding partner and/or as an extension into a related category

All five of these indices are combined to calculate the Power Brand Index of all the major brands in the category.

By exploring the components of the Power Brand Index, specific strategies are developed with the client to identify strengths and weaknesses of the brand. The goal of these strategies is to provide actionable steps that can be prioritized and implemented to increase the Power Brand Index relative to the index of competitors to make the client’s brand a Power Brand.