Gordon & McCallum: Our First Year!

Its been a year since we got going, and many of our friends and clients have been asking us what we've been up to. Well first, it's been a fascinating journey; we've managed to get involved in a wider variety of interesting tasks than we imagined possible a year ago and, with the help of our clients, have learnt a lot more about the challenges and opportunities facing our industry. In the course of this we've proved to ourselves, and we hope to our clients, that we really can help make market research (in the words of our blog's tagline) more productive, profitable, and even pleasurable.

Who We've Worked With

One publicity challenge we've encountered is the nature of the issues we've been involved with, which often mean we are asked to operate quietly, under the radar, and so cannot list our clients here. But, to give a flavour, we've now provided support to the full gamut of MR agencies. These include:

· Two major (top 5) international agencies

· Two large (Honomichl 50) US agencies

· A leading local agency in a major Asian market

· A top 30 UK agency

· A boutique specialist in the US

· A technology based start-up in Europe

Particularly pleasing has been that fact that, despite our short time in business, all our key clients have already worked with us on multiple projects.

We've spent the year working across the globe with clients from Asia, Europe, the United States, and Australia. Yet, while our travels this year have taken us to Europe, Japan, South-East Asia, and elsewhere, they've been a lot less extensive than those we used to undertake. We've been pleasantly surprised at the degree to which our structured approach to virtual consultancy makes it possible (and cost-effective) to provide remote support. (Download our GAPS brochure if you'd like to know more about that topic!)

Possibly most rewarding however, has been the huge variety of tasks we've been able to work on:

· Company/Unit QAR reviews and opportunity assessments

· Strategy setting for companies and services

· Market opportunity assessments

· Financial analysis, sales planning, and pricing reviews

· Business coaching

· General training and mentoring

· R&D and product implementation support

· Start-up business planning assistance

· Mentoring MR industry entrants on career building skills

Overall we feel we've managed to justify our claim of offering flexible, senior level resource that releases our clients' own management teams to focus on business development and client servicing.

We are also pleased to extend our industry connections and involvement. Most notable is our new affiliation with the US based Cambiar group (www.consultcambiar.com ) which greatly extends our access to industry expertise and thought leadership throughout the Americas. We've become more involved in the wider industry debates through a variety of forums and our own Reseach.Opinionated.Insightful blog which has attracted more readers than we'd dared hope for.

So it's been an exciting year, and we'd like to thank all our clients and friends of Gordon & McCallum for your support and trust. We're looking forward to the next year: among other things we are working with some very clever research professionals on new services to help users get more value from research and to build more effective partnerships with their agencies. We've also got some exciting people development services in the pipeline, and our first web-based training course will be coming online soon. Watch this space!

For more information on what we've been up to, and how we can help you improve ROI on market research, email: info@gordon-mccallum.com