Audience testing has been used for decades to judge how well a film or product will be received, but proponents of an emerging field called "neuromarketing" hope it can provide hitherto unseen insight into the minds of consumers.
Credit card interest rates soared in the second quarter to a nine-year spike, according to the market research company Synovate.
In the front offices of the trend-spotting network and online magazine TrendHunter.com, there are 15 workers wrangling 35,000 worldwide contributors -- but you'd be hard-pressed to find one filing cabinet.
It looks like Easter will put a little spring in shopper's steps, according to a survey released Tuesday.
In elementary school, there are classes you always look forward to -- gym, home economics and choir -- and classes you don't -- like English, science and geometry.
THURSDAY 3 p.m. Kristine Wexler can't remember what comes next. Wearing a pair of four-inch stilettos that are killing her feet, the CFO of In Context Solutions, a market research startup, stands mutely in front of a classroom at Rice University in Houston. Eleven judges -- investors and industry experts from around the country who have gathered to select the winners in Rice's annual business plan competition -- stare at her expectantly. Wexler's three teammates hover nearby, willing her to speak. She knows ICS's financials inside and out, but Wexler is at a loss.
Rates on mortgage loans are the lowest in the 37-year history of the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, according to a weekly report released Wednesday.
Despite the tough economic times, you can't just expect to stop lusting after those Frye riding boots you've had your eye on forever, or that your longtime trusted hair stylist is going to suddenly start cutting her prices.
Dear FSB: I run an e-commerce business (science lab notebooks for high schools and colleges) here in the U.S. I am thinking about expanding my business to the U.K. market. What do I need to know? Do I have to collect the VAT if I ship from the U.S.? If I set up a physical location in Britain for my inventory, office, etc., what do I need to know? Where can I find more information about entering the British market?
To project primaries and caucuses, CNN and its election experts use scientific statistical procedures to make estimates of the final vote count in each race. CNN will broadcast a projected winner only after an extensive review of data from a number of sources.
Dear FSB: Where can I find quality software for owners and operators in the trucking industry?
How would you like to work from home? No hustling out the door 10 minutes late, no fighting your road rage or battling for the last seat on train, no fast food lunch and no noisy co-workers. Sounds like heaven doesn't it?
Consumer product companies could gain a bigger share of their female customers' wallets by peering into the dark depths of their purses, according to a new study released today.
Dear FSB: We make a product called the GolfCap (golfcapads.com), which allows clients to buy advertising on tee boxes in golf courses and driving ranges. How can we best evaluate its appeal to potential clients? --Brad M. Monson Vice President, Operations Curb Appeal Outdoor Advertising Corp. Calgary, Alberta
Dear FSB: I'd love to start a small business in my hometown, but how do I analyze the market? What's an effective strategy for identifying a need in a town of 30,000? --Sidra Louis Miller, Edwardsville, Ill.
Ratings for Super Bowl XLI showed that more people watched the Indianapolis Colts' victory over the Chicago Bears than last year's game featuring the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks.
CBS is counting on a "Super"-sized audience to tune into this Sunday's big game between the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears.
The popularity of DVD players has surpassed VCRs in U.S. homes, according to a survey released by Nielsen Media Research.
A last-minute buying binge may have delivered a stellar final weekend of holiday sales but total retail sales gains for the 2006 holiday shopping period still fell short versus last year.
With the failure of torcetripib behind it, Pfizer is now likely to play to its strengths to add more medicines to its pipeline.
For the future of the television industry, eyes worldwide are watching Asia. The computer and Internet businesses may have sprung from the West, but with Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) it's the East that's leading the way.
Imagine a world where from the moment you wake to the moment you sleep, you are never free from a commercial tout. In the digital world, that is fast becoming a reality.
Remember when NBC was the king of prime-time TV in the 80s and 90s? Comedies like "The Cosby Show", "Cheers", "Seinfeld" and "Friends" helped the network attract viewers (and advertisers) by the millions, year-in and year-out.
Smartphone makers are aiming to extend their reach beyond corporate walls, but consumers may not heed the call.
Around and around the media merger merry-go-round goes. Where it stops, nobody knows.
Name a car, and there's at least one award that its maker can brag about winning from the Automotive Award-Giving Institute, or some such entity. Even respected vehicle-rating firms collectively bestow hundreds of honors each year, in categories ranging from the simple ("Car of the Year") to the inane ("Best Online Sales Experience").
Apple Computer is turning 30 but its meteoric rise in the music business makes it look more like it's 17.
KB Home's CEO Bruce Karatz is placing a big bet on New Orleans' recovery.
Microsoft is the clear leader in operating systems and office software but when it comes to the Internet, the company is way behind rivals Google and Yahoo!
Apple CEO Steve Jobs Tuesday unveiled the first Apple computers ever to use an Intel processor and announced that by the end of the year, Apple's entire computer line will contain Intel chips.
Now that the Atkins diet craze is dead -- the low-carb craze creator Atkins Nutritionals filed for bankruptcy in 2005 -- what'll be the next fad for food companies to jump on?
Bad news for holiday bargain hunters: Since so many of you were out there shopping the last full weekend before Christmas, retailers weren't offering deep-discount "panic sales."
Retail sales this weekend will be crucial as the holiday shopping season heads into what looks to be a nail-biting finish for the most important sales period of the year.
As U.S. retailers gear up for the final lap of the holiday shopping season, rising energy costs could turn into the Grinch that stole Christmas sales, according to results of a new consumer survey.
Cyber Monday, the online retail world's version of Black Friday, got off to a busy start as many holiday shoppers logged on at work and trolled the Internet in an effort to bag a few more bargains.
Apple is expected to turn in strong numbers when the company reports earnings Tuesday, but with a twist -- for once, it may not be all about the iPod.
Will consumers, not wanting to use $3 a gallon gas to get to the mall, shop online this holiday season instead?
The ripple effects from Hurricane Katrina may have just worsened the already challenging environment for the nation's restaurant industry, analysts cautioned.
Disneyland flung open its gates in Hong Kong on Monday in its first foray into the massive China market.
Locals call it Viagra Falls--a fountain in the middle of a roadside lake, spraying jets of water three stories high. On a summer morning under blue skies, it's a serene backdrop for a pair of elder...
As an attractive Englishwoman in her early 20s wanders the mall with a set of electrodes affixed to her scalp, David Lewis sees the activity of her alpha and beta brain waves--"the stuff of human t...
It's already the king of retailing. Give it another five years or so and Wal-Mart may be on its way to conquering other valuable little nuggets of the business world.
Carrie Bradshaw is revered on Madison Avenue for turning Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo into household names.
It wasn't in the bag for retailers this past weekend.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - There are more millionaire households in 2004 than ever, and they have increased in number at a record rate year-over-year.
Apple's mini iPod is expected to be a hot holiday pick this year but for gift-givers looking for other options, industry watchers say there are plenty of new gadgets that pack in the "must-have" appeal.
Minus "Friends" or any big breakout hits, NBC has stumbled out of the starting gate this TV season.
It could still be a hot holiday season for online merchants, even as other retailers worry that rising gasoline prices might chill consumer spending.
What's the quickest way for a retailer to shoo away potential customers? Believe it or not, it's not necessarily with prices but with bad customer service.
American swimmer Michael Phelps and NBC have something in common: With expectations high, both got off to a shaky start at the Olympics, but both are now showing signs that things have turned around.
You've opted to stay home to care for the kids. But you wouldn't mind making some extra income during those hours between sending your charges off to school and picking them up again.
Gap Inc. CEO Paul Pressler hinted Tuesday that the apparel retailer has two new concepts in the works that would extend the retailer's offerings beyond its three iconic brands of Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Two months ago, Microsoft spoke glowingly of bridging the gap between the PC and Xbox. Now the company is considering erasing that gap completely.
It takes more than $2-a-gallon gas to kill Americans' love affair with big SUVs.
Presented with a magazine ad touting GM's quality improvements, the middle-age man on the videotape checks off a box on his market survey card indicating that he feels reassured.
E-tailers enjoyed a robust holiday shopping season as total online sales jumped almost 30 percent over the same period last year, according to a market research firm's report.
Presented with a magazine ad touting GM's quality improvements, the middle-age man on the videotape checks off a box on his market survey card indicating that he feels "reassured." But Dan Hill, wh...
A stylish young woman sitting next to me at my favorite Tokyo sashimi joint whips out her digital camera and takes a picture of her boyfriend's fatty tuna. I can't take my eyes off her camera. It's...
It's somewhat disconcerting that Nancy K. Bryan knows more about how men regard their penises than any woman--no, any person--I've ever met. She's sitting across from me, dressed in what looks like...
Andrew Tomkins, a British computer scientist, is pretty much your typical ivory-tower egghead. He's spent his entire adult life either in academia--he earned advanced degrees from MIT and Carnegie-...
As the chairman and former CEO of Intel, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, Andy Grove has been a brilliant business strategist. FORTUNE sat down with him recently at Intel head-quarte...
You've just had that magical "AHA": A brilliant idea for a brand-new something-or-other. Congratulations. Now for the hard part, because when Thomas Edison said genius is 99 percent perspiration, h...
Objectivity should be the analyst's stock in trade. In the best of all worlds, analysts on Wall Street and at tech-industry research firms would spend their time giving unbiased, educated opinions ...
It's 6 A.M., and you've just popped a mug of water into the microwave for tea. While you wait for it to boil, you check up-to-the-minute stock quotes--from the front panel of your Internet-connecte...
Could the computer business possibly get any more competitive? Actually, yes, and that's good news if you're in the market for anything from your first PC or a better laptop to peripherals like mod...
Airline officials are accustomed to complaints about the hideous food they serve aloft. So it came as something of a surprise recently when Japanese passengers told British Airways executives that ...
You thought you understood them fairly well. You read their answers on market-research forms and peered at them in focus groups through one-way mirrors. When they said they were "satisfied" or "ver...
NEXT TIME YOU RUSH OUT the door at 6:45 a.m., nervous that the car won't start or that you'll miss the 7:06 commuter run, think about Millie Szerman, 49, phoning clients from her tub (on the cover)...
It started as a management practice, grew into a mantra, and now it's an all-out mania: listening to the customer. These days customers are variously described as "king," "first," "No. 1," "always ...
More than ever before, it pays to be rich. By rich--and this may come as a surprise if you consider yourself solidly middle class--we mean the roughly 6 million U.S. households with annual gross in...
Art markets have been so depressed for so long that dealers may be forgiven for feeling like the angst-ridden subject of Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Now, however, rays of optimism are beginning to...
ARE YOU competing to dominate your industry's future? To find out, ask yourself three questions we often ask senior managers: First, what percentage of your time is spent on external rather than in...
If you're in the market for life insurance -- or even if you aren't -- don't be surprised if an agent tries to sell you on variable universal life, an increasingly popular policy that combines a de...
Giveaways are everywhere these days as companies invent marketing hooks and trial offers to snare you as a customer. Last year U.S. businesses spent $7.2 billion on incentives and sample products, ...
IF YOU TAKE a long-lens camera into the flatlands around Chrysler's Auburn Hills, Michigan, test track, you might just steal a glimpse of the automaker's + 1996 model minivan. But what you'll see w...
People who buy mutual funds, annuities and other investments from banks had better be savvy -- or beware. An exclusive study for MONEY found that banks do a generally poor job on such basic tasks a...
KNOW thy customer! Unfortunately, heeding that rule of commerce is no easier than obeying the classic rule of life: Know thyself. Efforts to get to know the consumer cost a bundle, but many just do...
Dear Mr. Statistics: As a chap who took the liberal arts course and still keeps forgetting what a standard deviation is, I was recently unnerved to read in the Journal of Educational Psychology (Vo...
SO YOU THOUGHT you could slip into the supermarket and buy that diet-busting macaroni and cheese, and no one would know, eh? Wrong. Kraft knows. In fact Kraft USA knows quite a lot about macaroni-a...
ACCORDING TO Robert Wright, CEO of the National Broadcasting Co., here's how network television works: ''We're buying the most expensive programming available and taking it off the air quickly.''
SURE, THE ECONOMY is stumbling, causing most FORTUNE 500 CEOs to think we are in a recession or will be soon. But GNP hasn't shown a decline, so something must be keeping our heads above water. Whi...
FEW AMERICANS worried when Asian imports took over transistor radios and calculators in the 1970s. The auto invasion that followed was different, for it struck at a symbol of national industrial pr...
JUST BECAUSE the party has gone on for a long time doesn't mean everyone is having fun. Industries like paper and petrochemicals, which began adding capacity in the boom times a few years back, now...
Anthony J.F. O'Reilly, chief executive of Heinz since 1979, realizes that a company, much like a plastic bottle of ketchup, can be squeezed only so much. Even at Heinz, one of industry's most succe...
AS A SWISS-BORN ex-Marine, Chrysler Motors President Robert Lutz doesn't have much tolerance for euphemism. Even so, a little-noted speech he made to Chrysler suppliers was remarkable for its blunt...
High technology in the workplace conjures up images of the swinging robot arms and blinding lasers that have lifted productivity on the factory floor. Technology has generally been slow to pay off ...
HE LIVES up on the bluff, behind the wrought-iron gate, always on a plane just above eye level. Without fail, his grass is greener. He is the rich man, and he needs no introduction. As F. Scott Fit...
SOPHISTICATED new techniques of market research are yielding fascinating and sometimes startling facts about how consumers behave and how advertising works -- or doesn't. The new methods, introduce...
Ellen M. Hancock Making IBM a major force in telecommunications is a twofold job for Hancock, 43, vice president of the communications products division. ''My challenge is not only to bring the rig...
THE ACTRESS on the video screen looks 60-ish, well nourished, and confident. She is portraying a consumer, and she talks like no traditional grandma. ''At 65, my mother had become an old woman . . ...
CONSUMERS INTERESTED in finding out what's up at their local computer store may be better off checking out the obit section of the paper than the ads. In December Computer Depot, a publicly held ch...
THE AMIGA personal computer, introduced by Commodore International last July, wowed technology buffs and even raised hopes among the company's beleaguered shareholders. Wall Street analysts quickly...
BLACK & DECKER is halfway through the biggest brand swap in history. The company, known for power tools and its Dustbuster cordless vacuum cleaner, spent $300 million 19 months ago to buy General E...
WITH HIS deep-throated Nixonian baritone, Charles W. Moritz, chairman and chief executive of Dun & Bradstreet, likes to note the importance of tradition at the 144-year-old company. Yet he is chang...
IT'S ONE of the boldest gambles in marketing history, but Coca-Cola Chairman Roberto Goizueta, 53, says he has no qualms about changing the world's favorite soft drink after 99 years: ''I was much ...
HURTING FROM an epidemic of competition, the nation's doctors are trying some hitherto unheard-of remedies. An obstetrician in Houston sends corsages to new mothers. An ophthalmologist in Kansas Ci...
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