Following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, international bankers pushed rates to zero and sat on them for several years opening the door for commercial banks to lend money to corporate clients that cost them nothing.

In 2017 they began ratcheting rates up. Like a financial social climber at a debutante’s ball, interest rates edged up throughout the remainder of 2017, and 2018. In December 2018, the Chairman of the Fed said two additional increases were scheduled for 2019.

It looked like a stairway to the stars.

Then a month later, Chairman Powell started a strange back pedal. On January 4^th, he said that there might not be two rate increases in 2019 – he’d wait and see.

Then in March, he said there would be no more rate increases for the rest of the year. Then he fully reversed course. On July 30th, he cut rates ¼% and did it again on September 17^th.

A stunning turnaround.

Many think that it was Trump’s constant criticism of Powell that got the Fed boss to ratchet the rates down. The Donald, in one of his classic misguided attacks of his own appointees, publicly stated that Powell was blessed with a “horrendous lack of vision”. https://tinyurl.com/y2c4rycb

But there are other reasons for the Fed’s bipolar actions, not the least of which was the fact that the owners of the Fed, Jerome Powell’s real bosses, are the New York-based, money-center banks – they own the Fed and have reason for rates to remain low. 

This is a subject for another article, but we introduce the data here to show how challenging it would be if you were in the mortgage business where the cost of your inventory was in a constant state of flux.

As it is and has been for Sun Pacific Mortgage.

Sun Pacific Mortgage is a family-owned mortgage company based in the beautiful rolling hills of Santa Rosa, California.

We, On Target Research, did some work for Sun Pacific a few years ago with which they were quite happy. They got back in touch with us a few months ago for an update on the research and marketing advice.

We conducted new surveys of their clients and prospects. Interestingly, the main button had changed. I read the survey results 3 times. Yep. The main button had changed.

This can happen when circumstances change in a market or in the environment. 

We made recommendations based on the new survey results and worked with them on their positioning and marketing. 

The results?

“My name is Ari Walker and I’m the Marketing Director for a company called Sun Pacific Mortgage & Real Estate. We are a family owned and operated, credit money financing company for California and I want to say that Bruce Wiseman and On Target Research have done phenomenal work for us.  We’ve worked with them for 4 or 5 years, originally just to do surveys, buttons.  Then we picked it up another year and a half later and did another survey with him, and he has just really helped to fine tune our buttons, and our marketing and the promotion of our product.  

As a result, we’ve rocketed on the production.  We rocketed on our income.  And we’re definitely helping so many more people get into homes with private money financing.  And I know, for sure, that without Bruce Wiseman’s skills and direction we would not be doing what we’re doing today.  So, thank you!  And I highly, highly recommend him and his services for survey technology.  It definitely makes a big difference in helping your company expand.

Besides the super-kind testimonial, Ari sent me graphs of the company’s production and income. All graphs are in screaming affluence (virtually straight up) with the income hitting highest ever and shooting off the graph requiring a new page. I am not attaching them as I am presuming the numbers are confidential to the company; but trust me, implementing the new buttons and positioning and the company’s new aggressive marketing campaign is driving their stats to the moon.

From Ari…

“Attached are 3 main graphs from last month:  Loan Reaches In, Loans Logged, Gross Income.  (The Loan Reaches In are in a whole new range for past 2 months. The Loans Logged went straight up and the income graph was so high it went off the graph so Lynn had to make another graph!)”

Buttons are used to attract and interest the public in your message. But not just any buttons.  Only by using properly surveyed buttons will you know that your advertising and marketing funds are most efficiently spent with the best possible results.

Are you using buttons in your marketing? If so, are your buttons attracting business?

We have been conducting surveys to find the right buttons for our clients for 30 years. We know this world.

If you need some help with your marketing, give us a call.

Best,

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
ontargetresearch.com

       NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR 

George Orwell’s classic novel of a dystopian future overseen by the all-seeing despot, Big Brother, embodied omnipresent government surveillance, perpetual war and historical negationism (the rewriting of history).

It is a portrayal of government power and suppression of individual freedoms far beyond Orwell’s 1949 England and today’s governmental operations… or is it? 

If one were looking for a perpetual war, today’s never-ending War on Terror, 18 years old with no sign of ending, would certainly serve. The government surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden makes clear that your every phone call, Internet search and email is washed through Uncle’s digital fingers. And facial recognition software is embedded in cameras now strewn across the nation’s commercial landscape.

If you read 1984, you’ll recall that the protagonist, Winston Smith, worked in the Ministry of Truth, revising history to fit the current political demands.

“Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.” (Orwell, pp.47-48) “It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.”

Rewriting the past could never happen here, of course – setting aside the current destruction of statues of Civil War Generals throughout the South. It appears Robert E. Lee never existed, or so the City of New Orleans would have you believe.

I ran into this kind of historical revisionism, working on my 4^th fiction novel. I write a detective series (if you enjoy fiction thrillers, my books, under the pen name of John Truman Wolfe, are at Amazon. The fiction titles are Mind Games, The Gift, and Ransom. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=john+truman+wolfe&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 

At any rate, Tom McKenna, the protagonist, is a private eye who went to Boalt Hall, the heralded law school of the University of California at Berkeley. So, I was writing something about McKenna and in researching Boalt Hall found that it no longer exists, at least not as the official name of UC Berkeley’s law school, which it had been for over 100 years.

What happened?

The law school was named after John Boalt, a lawyer and sometime judge. In 1906, his widow, Elizabeth, donated land in San Francisco to be sold with the proceeds going for the construction of a new building for the law school at UC Berkeley.

The law school proudly carried this name for more than a century, when some committee at Cal, protecting the feelings of Berkeley’s Generation Snowflake, called for a name change because John Boalt had made some racially insensitive (racist) remarks more than a century earlier.

No one is justifying racist remarks. People who make them are low IQ fools, self-identified by what comes out of their mouth. But the Boalt brand had long ago outgrown and out shown the turn of the century lawyer for whom it was named.

Boalt was a brand. A brand that stood for graduating some of the greatest legal minds of the century.

Brands mean something.

Nike means sports – in all its ramifications. 

Google means search. (It has growing PR problems, but the brand still means search).

Titleist means golf ball.

B of A means banking.

But there are also local and regional brands. And having a brand that communicates and stands out above its competitors is valuable, indeed.

Some businesses don’t bother branding their product or service at all.

Some throw a name on what they produce without thought as to its communication value. You know, name a new tech product after their first-born child. Sure, the digital age has spawned some brands that don’t follow the rules – Google itself being an example.

But unless you have some seriously deep pockets to drive a non-sensical brand into the mind of your public, a brand should be descriptive of what you do. It should be memorable. 

Some communicate wonderfully. How about the organic/natural food market…Whole Foods? A great brand.

A while ago, a friend recommended a particular health supplement to me. It’s called Organifi.

Huh?

He sent me a link and I got some. But if someone had said, “You ought to get some Organifi…”

Which is a better contact lens brand?

SofLens…? Or Polycon?

Clarity…? Or Paragon?

Descriptive.

I have a brand of reading glasses called Peepers. Cute, clever brand.

There is an exact method of surveying for a name/brand for your product or service. We have conducted naming surveys for a wide variety of products and services.

A naming survey, particularly for a new product or service, can make a world of difference in the acceptance and want of the product.

Naming surveys are fast and quite reasonable.

If you are launching a new product or service, or perhaps are thinking about renaming one that you have, give us a call and I can let you know cost and timing.

Of course, to really boom your sales and income, we should also survey your products for buttons and positioning.

“On Target Research is fantastic. Their ability to extract relevant and powerful data from C-level executives (top execs) is remarkable. In a short period of time we were able to get profound insight into the hearts and minds of our potential clients. Their research is invaluable for all of our marketing, branding and sales initiatives.”     MA – President, Asperion, Inc. 

            ———–

“I can’t say enough how delighted I am with the result.  You and your team do a fabulous job. I really do like the positioning.  It fits exactly with what we ourselves know to be true about our brand and to have it concisely stated is exactly what we need.”  AS – Owner

———–

“[Before On Target]…I was only seeing 40 to 50 new patients a month.  After On Target… we have averaged over 100 new patients a month with a high of 132 (with a 50% raise in income).”     MB – DDS 

Marketing, advertising and PR should all be based on surveys. Omitting this vital step means you are taking a buzz saw to your own income stream.

Call us. We deliver surveys that drive sales.

Best,

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman
President & CEO
On Target Research
ontargetresearch.com
Bruce@brucewiseman.net
1-818-397-1401

In 1997, Steve Jobs said that Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy. Today Apple is the largest company in the world with a net worth of a trillion dollars.

But Steve Jobs died in 2011. And while Apple was a tech power brand in 2011, it was “only” the 8^thmost valuable brand globally at that time and so there have been other factors.

“Apple has been the largest name in technology for years. This is not necessarily because they are the most innovative. Instead, it is because they use market research to find out exactly what their customers want from their devices; they then figure out how to make those wants a reality.”
…
“These surveys have led to different designs and modifications of Apple products. Such modifications include having bigger screens to view videos and games more clearly.^”
https://www.surveypolice.com/blog/how-5-massive-companies-changed-using-market-research/

They conduct massive amounts of market research including breaking down surveys by location, market segment [age] and other differentiators. As an example…
“After several quarters of declining sales, McDonald’s executives decided, in 2015, that major changes were required to combat the public perception of McDonald’s products as being unhealthy. Based on market research, the company made menu changes and no longer sells chicken products containing human antibiotics or other ingredients, such as phosphates and maltodextrin. Other changes include the addition of more salad choices and healthier desserts including apple slices.”
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/market-research-2948350d
Okay. Eliminating antibiotic laced chicken and including apple slices with Happy Meals may not make them the Whole Foods of the fast food restaurant world, but it’s movement in the right direction, driven by customer sentiment. We’ll give them a happy face on the refrigerator door.
How about that cuppa’ Joe?

“Starbucks has been successful over many decades largely because of its stellar business strategies. The company expertly employs market research to keep its offerings and marketing messaging in line with consumer sentiment.”
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/brand-equity-case-study-engaged-starbucks-customers-2296829

There is a short 2+ minute video on our site that gives a couple of excellent real life examples of positioning – ontargetresearch.com.

“In addition, the positioning that grew out of your research was nothing short of stellar! We now have a strategically researched, laserlike position that will dramatically assist us in rolling out our new brand.”
JLD, President.

“The business we received from these surveyed menus was phenomenal. Our take-out business increased 150% in just a few days. It has leveled off in a range about double what it had been before the survey was done.”

P B Manager

Best,
Bruce

In the early nineteenth century, from about 1820s to 1846s, immense Mexican land grants of tens of thousands of acres dominated the California landscape. The grants covered the soft rolling hills along the coast and inland and became grazing lands for cattle on a thousand hills in the halcyon days of Mexican California.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Massachusetts had become the recognized capital of American shoe manufacturing and the booming new industry needed leather, lots of it.

That need created a whole new paradigm: sleek, three-masted clipper ships loaded with provisions such as iron cooking pots, farm tools, musical instruments, gunpowder, coffee and tea, spices, cocoa, sugar and molasses, silks and lace sailed from Boston and made the torturous 17,000 mile, 6 month journey to California. (Makes one think twice about complaining about the economy seats in the 5-hour flight across the country).

Once arrived in ports like Monterey, San Diego, Santa Barbara, they would trade their goods for the valuable cow hides which would be carried back to Boston to feed the ravenous shoe manufactures.