Meet BRS
This document is designed to provide you with some background on the BRS Group. It will hopefully get you to pick up the phone or email us to ask more about our capabilities and what we can do to help your business.
Click here to read more (PDF)

Listening
Listening means going to consumers where they are and hearing about what matters to them. Seeing their world. Listening to how they speak. Engaging in dialogue. Click here to read more (PDF)

Personas
What is a persona? A shorthand for uncovering the complexities of the dynamic tableau that is a target segment, and for illuminating a segment’s dramatic, real-world, compelling characteristics. A way to showcase the target as real people, with depth and understanding for who they are and what their lives are like. Click here to read more (PDF)

PNA
The Primary Need Array is our empirically derived, fully validated set of primary needs which we believe sit behind the great majority of consumer and B2B product and service offerings. Click here to read more (PDF)

Semiotics
Understanding cultural context is the starting point for any holistic exploration of the consumer. Our world is full of signs and symbols that have inherent meaning. These signs and symbols reflect and shape how we think about brands and products, from the structured world of printed text, advertising and packaging, to the unstructured blogosphere. Click here to read more (PDF)

Usability
The beauty of having a website is that customers can find you with a couple of key strokes. But they can leave just as fast if their experience on your site is unsatisfactory. Usability testing offers a fast and affordable way to smooth out all the bumps and assure that visitors to your website will have a positive experience. Click here to read more (PDF)

Video Gaming
Despite the state of the economy, the gaming industry is still growing, with the bulk of near term success coming from the US, Europe and Asia, and bright long-term prospects in the third world. But, it’s getting tougher and tougher. For example, within the US, we are approaching game saturation. Therefore, it has become even more important for new games to “get it right, right away.” Click here to read more (PDF)

Automotive Opinion Piece by Lorne McMillan, Managing Partner

Some Unintended Consequences of Automotive Brand Alliances - how consumers react to this, and why a Chrysler/Fiat alliance might be a good thing.

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Managing Global Brands by Malcolm Baker, Founding Partner

Increasingly affordable information and other technologies allow brands to be customized for local cultures and for individual consumers. The question for brand strategists is whether, when, where and how to do this. Are global brands merely those that are distributed worldwide, or can “globalness” itself be an element of a brand’s equity?

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Get Real: Return of the Product by Malcolm Baker, Founding Partner

The broad history of consumer culture has been largely concerned with the evolution of goods from commodity status to the sophisticated constructs we now call brands. And in our relationships with these constructs there is often a natural tension between elements of the product and the surrounding construction of the brand.

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Ethnography Within Consumer Research: A Critical Case of Consumer Film Festivals by Lorne McMillan, Managing Partner

A paper published in 2007 which is a critique of a technique used by BRS and Xbox to get deeper into ethnographic research that sought to collect creative material from consumers across different languages and cultures.

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Qualitative Toolbox: Open Up A Secret World by Malcolm Baker, Founding Partner

What struck us most was the confessional nature of the blogs, the ease and pleasure women took in revealing the detailed contents of their bags, the stories behind certain objects and the rich, often complicated relationships they had with individual bags.

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Time for a New Model?: The Ignored Importance of Brands in the American Auto Industry by Lorne McMillan, Managing Partner

This article makes the case that two significant contributors to the decline of American automotive companies are an under-appreciation of the role of branding coupled with a squandering of brand equity through badge engineering.

Click here to read the article (PDF)