At a time when small marketing research and consulting firms are coming back to life in a post-recession environment — the ones that managed to survive in the first place, that is — one local, low-key firm is garnering attention for all the right reasons.
The privately-held The Pert Group is aggressively increasing its domestic headcount, has significantly increased its office space in Connecticut and is expanding globally by opening its first overseas office.
The Pert Group has been in Bloomfield since its start in 1978, adding offices in Kansas City and Pittsburgh along the way. This spring, The Pert Group relocated its headquarters from Bloomfield to a larger, 23,562 square-foot office space at The Exchange in Farmington. And in April, the group opened its first international office in London, a location from which it plans to service its expansion across Europe.
The Pert Group, initially founded as a provider of quantitative data, is today among a handful of consulting companies that enables clients to understand their customers — a clear outcome of a change in strategy in 2009. That year, the firm, then known as PERT Survey Research, made two strategic acquisitions, adding Kansas City-based Market Directions, a brand and strategy consulting firm, and Pulsar Research, a specialist in public policy and customer experience, founded by two professors at the University of Connecticut, Kenneth Dautrich and Christopher Barnes.
“We survived the recession better because of this synergy,” said Dale Lersch, CEO and principal.
In fact in 2010, a year after the acquisitions, revenue shot up by 29 percent.
“In the next couple of years, we’re looking for about 15-20 percent growth to come from Europe, Latin America and Asia,” said Doug Guion, the firm’s senior vice president of operations and client service administration. “We are already doing a lot of BRIC work (consulting work for clients whose customers are located in Brazil, Russia, India and China).”
So far, the group seems to have gotten its strategy right and its portfolio of clients — totaling 50 to date — include big-name corporations such as Travelers, Cigna, Nestle, Diageo, Pepperidge Farm and Kraft.
The firm’s custom market research services include customer satisfaction consulting, market segmentation, ad tracking, and brand/product/corporate positioning.
“The industry is increasingly looking for more than data collection. You need to provide insights to clients so that they can understand their customers better,” Guion said.
New Jersey-based Laura Donovan, associate director for consumer science at Kraft Foods Inc., chose The Pert Group for that very reason. “We are currently working with them to understand how consumers feel and react to one of our products in the confectionary category,” Donovan said.
She explained that a lot of larger consulting firms specialize in understanding concept and consumer advertising, such as advertising during product launches, which drive initial sales. But they don’t help clients in understanding a product from a consumer’s point of view, which is the bedrock of repeat sales.
“We’ve found that obtaining direct feedback, such as through questionnaires, doesn’t give us the information we need. So we collaborate with Pert and talk to consumers — for example via focus groups — about our products in a language that is specific to them. We then analyze how that language can be put into concepts and help find white space for new product possibilities. A product is a bundle and positioning it well will account for repeat sales,” Donovan said.
She added that Kraft is getting ready to conduct additional consumer research in Europe, Latin America and Asia through The Pert Group.
Lenox Tools, a global company headquartered in East Longmeadow, Mass., also has had good results working with The Pert Group.
“We’ve worked with different vendors and found that Pert has the greatest level of strength in strategic analysis in helping us identify the Lenox brand positioning,” said Mark Leichthammer, director of global consumer and market insights at Lenox Tools.
For example, said Leichthammer, The Pert Group’s analysis showed that the return on investment from providing free samples to customers was higher than the returns from advertising Lenox products.
“They’ve enabled our organization to leverage our marketing dollars and become more focused in our spending,” he said.
In The Pert Group’s typically understated language, Guion said, “We are fiscally conservative, have grown by word of mouth, and will continue to grow sensibly.”