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Escalent

Escalent is a top human behavior and analytics advisory firm specializing in industries facing disruption and business transformation. As catalysts of progress for more than 40 years, we tell stories that transform data and insights into a profound understanding of what drives human beings.

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Escalent Services

Escalent is top human behavior and analytics firm specializing in industries facing disruption and business transformation. Through world-class consultants, award-winning tools, and authentic engagement between brands and stakeholders, we translate data into human truths to help drive organizations forward.

Customer Experience

Your brand is not simply a moment in time. It is every touch point. Each interaction. Every single time. Therefore, your success is only as strong as your customers’ experiences.

Product Development

New products dreamed of the right way, built the right way, and launched the right way can change everything. We help you assess market opportunities, shape concept creation, evaluate concepts to reveal “the winner,” and, ultimately, optimize your product.

Brand Management

Creating a brand takes tremendous care, effort, and research. But that’s when the real work begins. Managing your brand over time to continuously inspire engagement, loyalty, and love is how you build sustainable success.

Brand Creation

The birth of a brand is a rare, remarkable opportunity. And you have one opportunity to get it right. Through the power of exacting positioning, scrutinized messaging, and inspirational brand elements, we systematically remove the obstacles to success. From day one.

Market Exploration

It’s an uncertain world. At Escalent, we believe knowledge is the antidote. For the past 40 years, we have helped thousands of domestic and global clients grow by daring to follow consumers on their journey and daring to harness the data at their fingertips to connect with customers in a deeper way than they ever thought possible.

Skills

B2B Marketing . Brand Marketing . Content Marketing . Digital Marketing . Marketing Strategy

Locations

Headquarter Information

17430 College Parkway Livonia, MI 48152
734-542-7600

All Locations

Livonia, MI

Escalent Case Studies

Understanding technology buying dynamics among college students

This research provided a guiding light to better interact—and engage—with student populations globally. Thank you, Escalent!

INSIGHTS MANAGER AT A GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY COMPANY.A major technology firm wanted to grow its user base among college students—specifically, it wanted to understand:

Student purchase triggers
Attraction to a particular platform, brand or device
If there were patterns as to when and why students became loyal to a technology platform or brand
Student satisfaction with the technology used for schoolwork and areas that triggered switching behavior
Actual device usage and if device features helped or hindered key uses
Impact of COVID-19 on students in relation to accomplishing schoolwork (and social interaction) across products and services purchased.Escalent conducted a two-phased approach using qualitative and quantitative research. We started with focus groups that allowed us to understand the student purchase journey. To ensure that we appropriately represented multiple economic, family dynamic and educational system differences, we conducted these surveys across multiple us and global regions.

Using findings from the qualitative study, we customized a quantitative survey to address a number of subjective and objective measures, to determine student motivations and to identify purchase decision drivers. The qualitative study gave us deep insight into the language college students use and identified the areas of interest and concern specific to college students around selecting technology.Escalent provided deep insights to help our client develop a more strategic marketing plan to prioritize and speak to college students more effectively. Leveraging the learnings from both the qualitative and quantitative portions of the research, the company launched:

New promotional offerings for students
An overall roadmap for hardware and software feature updates
New messaging to draw students to the brand
An ongoing program to work with student, faculty and school system outreach programs for each region

Measuring and monitoring KPIs to track brand health from the developers’ perspective

A leading technology firm that relies on a healthy social platform and development ecosystem for profitable growth was struggling to stay on top of brand health and sentiment, platform and development usage, and overall developer relationship measures. The brand health measurements it had were outdated due to an extremely competitive environment and a constant evolution of software and services landscape. The firm needed to quickly determine how it could keep a “pulse” on engagement across its segments of interest.

The client asked Escalent’s advice on the best way to build a program that would provide consistent feedback on each segment. It was also important to effectively track KPIs that would allow key stakeholders to understand what, when and why they need to change or adjust course within the platform.Escalent designed and deployed a global research program across North America, Europe and Asia that provided insight across all regions, while keeping the program within our client’s research budget.

We then developed a feedback engine that provided a consistent stream of critical metrics for over a dozen stakeholder groups across the organization. We developed a key metrics dashboard with weekly results reported to the executive team.

In addition to managing the setup and delivery mechanics, we partnered with the client to manage competing stakeholder requests to help it avoid muddling the insights by overloading the study. We also provided assistance as the program evolved, helping to update the study for current needs while maintaining trends.Escalent’s insights provided the direction the client needed to refine its messaging across a global audience and forge a stronger relationship with its developers. Additionally, the findings illustrated a better understanding of the sentiment driving engagement decisions and the overall impact to brand health over time.

We continue to provide ongoing insights to facilitate and identify multiple areas of opportunity to further increase engagement and pivot as feedback and sentiment evolves. This process ensures the integrity of the most important and trendable KPIs and gives our client the ability to be agile and responsive to its customers and stakeholders.

Improve brand visibility and product adoption

A major technology company needed to improve its brand visibility and product adoption in the gaming space. The goals were to:

Establish a measurable baseline for how developers and publishers perceive the brand as a whole, within segments and as a leader in the gaming space
Evaluate the brand’s position versus competitors’ across key metrics in each product area’s offering
Improve how information is organized to promote the ability of gaming professionals to create great games, connect and engage with players, and scale its business
Track and measure changes in key metrics and the impact of its various marketing initiatives in the gaming segment.Escalent conducted a quantitative brand awareness tracker in 15 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe/Middle East and Asia-Pacific to provide a broad range of insight from game developers and publishers in the mobile-, PC and console-gaming space.

The research focused on five product areas: marketing, monetization, cloud, distribution platforms, and streaming and community.

We developed a study that enabled the client to measure awareness, consideration and favorability to help improve usage and overall standing in the industry.Escalent provided the insight and direction to:

Increase awareness by launching new marketing initiatives in specific areas of importance
Pivot to focus on the changes needed to improve areas of weakness
Explore new areas of opportunity
The value of our research motivated the client to map out a long-term progression of new research programs to continually improve and strengthen the ROI of its gaming products and services.

5G and evolutionary tech: What’s in it for B2B?

Our largest telecommunication client wanted to better understand how its business messaging resonated with B2B buyers. The client was especially interested in understanding how 5G messages were landing.

As 5G evolves, there is a lot of “noise” in the market—competitors are making claims about seamless 5G coverage, touting different types of bandwidth for coverage in urban versus rural areas and the benefits of the high-speed access to business operations. Many of these use cases surround other evolving and complex technologies, such as edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT).

All these different messages amount to a lot of confusion among business decision-makers regarding what these new technologies mean for their business.Escalent designed a qualitative study, featuring IT decision-makers (ITDMs) across business segments. This allowed us to dig into how our client’s 5G messages were connecting with buyers by industry, as well as identify which use cases were most important to each type of decision-maker.

Using our world-class qualitative team, we recruited decision-makers who live and breathe technology and telecom in their business. We conducted in-depth interviews with 25 ITDMs to get to the bottom of their expectations for the new technology, which companies they see as leaders in the 5G space, and which use cases were the most relevant to each ITDM interviewed.Escalent identified the nuances of what influences business leaders’ decision-making processes. While these professionals served across very different industries, there were common themes regarding which use cases resonated most.

As a result, our client improved its messaging across every industry it served. And our client is using the results as part of its PR strategy.

This topic is constantly evolving as the new technology is rolled out across the US. We continue to monitor ITDMs for our client so it can create and modify messaging to ensure it continues to resonate with each customer segment.

Building a deep partnership

An up-and-coming liquid nutrition manufacturer with a passionate customer base was working on securing contracts and funding to bring its products into retail stores and grow the overall business. The company needed to better understand its customers, competitors and the untapped market it dreamed of reaching to prove the viability of its growth potential with investors. Although the company initially only wanted help with an immediate communications issue, the relationship quickly deepened and the client began to rely on Escalent to fill in the remaining gaps in market understanding. With every new or persistent issue this brand faced, Escalent was its partner of choice—from informing communications strategies and product development, to measuring consumer and health care professional (HCP) perceptions and attitudes.Over three years, Escalent designed and executed a collection of qualitative and quantitative research that developed into a 360-degree approach to brand equity.

We established consumer and HCP trackers to measure ever-changing market perceptions. Online qualitative discussions with key customer targets provided a deeper understanding of what drives product recommendations. A consumer journey analysis provided complete insight into how customers shopped for products in the liquid nutrition space and identified which touchpoints are most influential to potential buyers. And a segmentation study identified distinct customer categories and the best outreach strategies.

Escalent’s world-class analysts and marketing scientists led every step of building this holistic approach to brand equity and market landscape.What began as a “one and done” collaboration resulted in a strong multiyear relationship that is deeply consultative and built on a foundation of trust, respect and results.

The liquid nutrition company has taken every recommendation and insight to heart as it has used every single piece of research in yearly planning, C-suite readouts and investor presentations. The results speak for themselves, with the company successfully raising $100M in funding to support its growth since the foundation of the research relationship with Escalent.

Assessing the value placed on hospital awards

[The research] has actually saved us money because we aren’t spending it promoting awards that are not going to drive our business. The other thing we learned is we need to do a better job of promoting ourselves, so the awards are more in line with our brand.

A LARGE, REGIONAL HEALTH SYSTEM.A large, regional health system sought to understand the value consumers place on hospital awards like U.S. News Best Hospitals, Watson Health Top 15 Health Systems, and Healthgrades Top Hospitals. The system needed to understand which award—if any—would offer the most long-term marketing value.

Health systems often invest significant resources to purchase the rights and promote hospital awards so understanding how much value they hold among consumers when making healthcare decisions—like selecting a hospital or new healthcare provider—is critical in evaluating the financial investment.To evaluate the benefits that each award offered specific to our client’s health services, Escalent designed an online survey that leveraged a sequential monadic design and multiple trade-off exercises.

We asked respondents to “trade-off” various criteria when selecting a hospital or health system to understand the patient decision-making process. We then used two paired comparison exercises—pre- and post-award education—to assess which awards instilled more confidence when selecting a hospital or health system. The final and most critical component of the research measured the impact branded awards (or, in some cases, no award) had on various brand perceptions of key health systems.Escalent identified the “winning” award for our client—the research clearly established which hospital award would provide the health system with the longest life and value to attract and retain patients. And, perhaps more importantly, it identified which awards would not add value and thus not be worth the financial investment.

Additionally, Escalent mapped out the key areas of opportunity in education and promotional elements for the best messaging around the awards.

Our findings enabled the client to make a data-driven decision, which resulted in financial savings for the organization, by only promoting the award that demonstrated the ability to elevate the brand.

Marketing Agency's Mission

Escalent Mission

We are looking for people who want to accelerate our clients’ understanding of how their products and services can work better for people. We listen, learn, question, discover, innovate, and deliver — for each other and our clients. If you want to be part of a bold mission, work with talented team members who can help you learn and grow, and have fun while doing it — Escalent might be the place for you. Below is a list of our current openings.

Work With Escalent

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