To discover the power and potential of marketing research and analytics, take a bunch of creative people away from their desks and drop them into the reality of a live-selling environment.
Deckers Brands, the footwear company based in Goleta, California, has a design team working on its UGG line of boots just down the coast in Santa Barbara. And, with a strong nudge from Vital Findings, a Culver City, California-based marketing researcher, that group traveled to Chicago, in mid-winter, for a product "immersion" exercise.
"You can only imagine that your view of Santa Barbara is very different for a product...