Through a series of successful mergers and acquisitions, our client had more than doubled in size in just four years, becoming a much more diverse organization with people from many different countries, nationalities, and corporate cultures. This diversity was reflected in the 35 different leadership development programs that were made available, with each business or group of businesses deciding on its own local offering. As a result, the quality of the training was uneven throughout the organization. Moreover, it became evident to our client that it was missing a critical opportunity — to develop a common understanding of what it means to be a leader in the organization.

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A leading insurance firm wanted to find out how individuals, employees, employers, and insurance brokers would respond to a variety of dental insurance plan concepts.

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In the autumn of 2005, CSR was retained to conduct research on behalf of a national trade association serving a subset of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. This 300-member organization represents nearly $700 billion in annual sales. The president of the organization was retiring after nearly two decades in office, and his departure represented a unique opportunity to take a hard look at the association’s direction. It had been several years since the completion of the last business plan, and the upcoming transition called for the development of a new, multiyear strategy.

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Advertising is the life blood of the newspaper industry. In recent years — as competition for ad dollars has toughened and circulation numbers have dropped — the importance of maintaining advertiser loyalty and satisfaction has become increasingly clear to publishers and owners. To that end, CSR was engaged by one of the largest newspapers in the world to help senior management understand a number of pivotal factors related to improving satisfaction among critical advertisers.

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Success in business is often not about having the best product or service, but about planting the right idea in the customer’s head and keeping it there. Getting “positioning” right in a prospective customer’s mind is therefore still the most important strategy in business. One CSR client, a major insurance carrier, retained CSR to help it construct a powerful positioning statement for one of its core group benefit offerings.

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It’s no secret that the movie business is changing. Today, new movies go quickly to DVD, and people in certain demographics go less often to the movies (if at all). As a result, newspaper advertising dollars coming from the major movie studios have been cut virtually in half in recent years. Faced with this dilemma, one of the largest newspapers in the U.S. engaged CSR to obtain a better understanding of the needs of its movie studio advertiser base — a group which generates in excess of $100 million in annual ad revenue for the paper.

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A worldwide executive search firm with a growth imperative retained CSR to conduct interviews of clients and several different prospect “types” (i.e., that varied by size, industry, and location) to better understand:

• Expectations of and experiences with retained executive search firms,
• Retention criteria regarding retained executive search firms,
• Recommendations for improvement in services, and
• Reactions to proposed opportunities to expand executive search firms’ services.

Not only did CSR deliver a comprehensive expansion strategy to the client based on the responses to these questions, we also overlaid on that strategy a segmentation of the market based on the needs of customers and prospects — not on their size, industry, or location.

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