Merry Christmas - Happy New Year

First I would like to wish all my clients and contacts a very happy and peaceful Christmas and a successful and rewarding New Year in 2016. We value our relationships with our clients and reinforce our continuing commitment to 'more insight for less cost' in market research, business analysis and marketing strategy. Sincerely Tony Nix

Our Past Year

Since 1990, Solutions Marketing has completed over 400 projects for more than 100 clients averaging about 16 projects each year. 2015 was a somewhat lean year with only 6 significant projects.

First was a Supermarket Scorecard study in late March, of 1,000 Main Grocery buyers across Australia, where they rated the performance of the major supermarkets, Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, IGA & Costco. It is now public knowledge that Woolworths performed worst on all important attributes. Their share price was just under $30 at the time of the research, and I recommended to a few of my friends that they should sell. No-one took my advice, but they should have as the current price is $22.93 a drop of over 23%. I suspect the WOW shares will drop further, as they pull back on their dividends and invest more in price competition with Coles & Aldi.

Second was the completion of my Expert Witness report for the Noni Life Skin care damages action, completed in Feb, 2015. It took the opposing side, 4 months to find their expert witness and then to ask for a soft copy of my report and associated excel model. Their expert is Andrew Ross a partner and head of Korda Mentha’s Forensic Accounting team. They will be providing their evidence to our legal team this week, so another 5 months have passed. It seems some initial mediation may occur at which time they may try to settle. I hope not; I am looking forward to crossing horns with Andrew Ross in a head to head expert witness tussle. This is not likely to occur until after March, next year.

Third was an Excel financial model of a highly complex Early Childhood Education start-up business, completed in June. My client having a much clearer understanding has taken up a franchise.

Fourth was a 10 year financial model linking P&Ls, Cash Flows, Balance sheets & a Fixed Asset Register, showing the effect of the potential conversion of grass courts to synthetic surfaces for the Mosman Lawn Tennis Club.

Fifth was a project identifying the potential GST recovery by Local Governments across Australia, of GST paid on income gained from the use and/or sale of assets. My client, a chartered Accountant and a GST expert and his JV partner a very clever barrister, believe that based on the Milton case in Victoria where Councils were held to be part of a State, Councils have incorrectly been paying GST to the Federal Government since the year 2000. If litigation funding can be arranged, they will conduct a case in the High Court, for return of the GST paid, which could amount to hundreds of millions of Dollars.

Sixth was a complex pricing model designed to incentivise the development of up to 10,000 web-sites across Australia.

Australian market conditions have been very soft, with many companies pulling back on their marketing and consumer research spending, just when they should be spending more. When markets are growing a company just has to be there, but when they are contracting, it is important to be much more aggressive in promotional spending. Some key companies have changed hands and some are now conducting their own research using ‘Survey Monkey’ and more often than not, making a monkey out of themselves in the process, due to poor questionnaire design and weak implementation. Not only do we ensure each questionnaire extracts the maximum knowledge; but I suspect we are the only research company to use Boolean Logic skips to weed out up to 30% unacceptably hasty or invalid responses to online quantitative research questions, resulting in significantly more accurate research findings...

Nevertheless I will bat on, mainly because I enjoy the intellectual stimulus as well as the money!

Apart from playing a little more tennis I did not waste my extra time.

I updated my Solutions Marketing website to be mobile responsive and included a number of snazzy improvements. A number of clients particularly like the way my Case Study examples and my Client List, change to reflect particular disciplines e.g., Focus group research or Quantitative research or Business modelling etc. I also refreshed and updated ‘My 50 Best Marketing Questions’ with a Digital & Social Media section. Take a look; I think you might find the checklist very interesting. See http://www.solutionsmarketing.com.au/ and just click on ‘Download our E-Book’

Most importantly I am now using a new improved and highly sophisticated data analysis package for my Quantitative research. It’s called Q-Data Analysis - See www.quirks.com/articles/2010/20100802.aspx

Finally, I also updated my LinkedIn site, see… https://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?locale=en_US&trk=profile-preview

I added my company published some articles, joined some Interest Groups and are following others. More work is needed here in the coming year. LinkedIn will be my Social Marketing vehicle.

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Finally, I want to pay particular credit to my website developer and Social Media advisor - Kevin Spiteri of the Menace Group. Kevin will be creating a dashboard monitor for my website early in 2016. He and his team are not only brilliant but cost effective.

Also to Ben Gilbert head of Consumer Sector Research – UBS Investment Bank; as I said last year, it is gratifying to know that UBS, one of the world’s most successful investment companies can rely on our research findings to add market and consumer insights to a number of their investment reports.