How to Use the MacroMonitor
Financial institutions, corporations, associations, consulting firms, and government agencies have used the MacroMonitor for hundreds of purposes during its existence. Some of the most common follow.
Cross-Selling
The number of financial institutions, intermediaries, and instruments that any household uses or owns is limited. The key to growth in markets that are not growing is either to sell more products to existing customers or to steal competitors' customers. The MacroMonitor provides detailed information about the number and types of financial products and services that each household has at its primary financial provider as well as elsewhere. You can compare this information with internal information about what customers own at your institution in a "Gap Analysis." From this information, financial providers can determine what additional products and services they should offer to which customers to increase their loyalty, which products and services they should use to attract customers from competitors, and—just as important—which products and services they do not need to emphasize.
Planning Strategy
As part of any strategic-analysis process, the MacroMonitor is the best tool for understanding consumers and their financial services. Because of its size, its scope, and its ability to trend findings, the MacroMonitor can help to create any consumer financial target—using any combination of demographics, financial-products use, channel preferences, or financial attitudes—and provide a comprehensive analysis of that population. What's more, users can create the same target in prior waves of the data to provide a trend that shows how the target has evolved to the present. Finally, the knowledge and experience of CFD analysts applied to these trends provides highly logical and likely projections of how the target will evolve in the future.
Implementing Tactics
Once an organization has decided on a course of action and a target, the next step is to implement that plan. The MacroMonitor provides the detailed information necessary to assist in the implementation of any strategic plan. Findings from the MacroMonitor may seamlessly apply to planning, products, prospects, and customers. The MacroMonitor has three levels of implementation:
- The Bronze level. An organization may apply any finding or target from the MacroMonitor to customer files or prospect lists using demographic, product-use, or other segmentation variables. Clients may append the MacroMonitor data with PRIZM, P$YCLE, MicroVision, IPA, Inve$tyles, Echelon, FICO scores (for credit users only), and SRIC-BI's own VALS consumer psychographic segmentation system. Because of its scope, the MacroMonitor may also be useful to (re-)create your existing proprietary segmentation system, enabling you to explore the entire contents of the program through the lens of your segments.
- The Silver level. CFD has a strategic partner in Information Asset Partners (IAP) to create custom models for identifying targets among your customers or prospects. Using any of the various services that may append variables (that is, Acxiom, Experion, and so on), IAP appends the relevant and appropriate variables to both the MacroMonitor and the user's customer or prospect files. Using multivariate techniques and our years of experience in modeling, CFD uses the MacroMonitor with the appended variables as dependent variables to create algorithms that predict membership in a target group. Once CFD has optimized and tested these models, it can apply them to the user's customer files or for the selection of prospects to identify the optimal targets.
- The Gold level. The best way to apply all the information in the MacroMonitor to your customer files is to implement a proprietary customer oversample. By administering the questionnaire to a representative sample of customers, a user can apply any of the MacroMonitor's findings, concepts, or insights to customers. Using the same modeling approach as that of the Silver level, the Gold level has the insurmountable advantage of having customers' actual responses. Because the sample is representative of customers, any of the insights or information from the MacroMonitor may apply directly to a customer oversample. Appending all or any of the information resident in customer files along with all the variables that may come from the appending services provides an extraordinarily rich set of variables on which to base the predictive models. Then, given these models, a user may apply any of the MacroMonitor findings to the entire customer file.
- Demographics
- More than 200 financial attitudes
- Complete financial product and service use
- More than 100 recent and likely financial behaviors
- Institutional use (by both type and specific name for up to 200 institutions)
Creating Balance Sheets
The MacroMonitor contains incidences and dollar amounts for all financial products, services, and channels. It creates critical variables—such as net worth, total investable assets, total savings, and total debt—by calculation instead of by asking respondents. It can create a complete household balance sheet for any target population. For example, it can identify millionaires, households with more than 50% of their home equity available, Boomers, households with Boomerang children, single parents, dual-income families, union members, and so on. Clients may use these product inventories and balances to identify cross-selling opportunities.
Analyzing a Data Warehouse and Updating Customer-Information Files
- Use as an analytic engine.
- Append attitudinal variables.
- Fill in missing fields.
- Update old information.
Identifying Channel Use and Preferences
The MacroMonitor gathers data about aided awareness, current use, past use, and recent purchase at specific institutions. We identify the household's primary institution of each type, as well as the products and services that the household obtains at each. We measure use of and interest in alternative technologies to access financial services—including personal computers, PDAs, phones, cable and satellite TV, smart cards, and kiosk bankings—and the speed of the connection. We also have the largest list that measures interest in and use of specific financial services through the Internet that is trendable for more than a decade. Finally, we identify households that have obtained specific financial services via mail, telephone, and Internet direct marketing, as well as those that are receptive or resistant to these channels.
Creating Segmentations
Because of its comprehensive nature, the MacroMonitor is better than any other tool for creating, appending, validating, or linking information. All types of market segmentations are possible: life-stage segments; age-by-income segments; custom segmentations; all commercial segmentations such as PrizmNE, P$YCLE, MicroVision, and IXI's Inve$tyles and Echelon; creditworthiness segmentations such as by FICO scores; attitudinal segmentations such as in the VALS system. In addition, the CFD group has developed thousands of custom and proprietary segmentations for ourselves and our customers. With more than a quarter century of designing, implementing, and interpreting segmentations, you can take advantage of our vast experience to apply an existing segmentation or to create and implement a new custom design.
Providing Background or Substituting for Proprietary Research
These days, no organization can afford to do proprietary research in every area. The MacroMonitor can provide background information in those areas targeted for proprietary research, helping you to focus your efforts and resources where they will be most effective. Sometimes the MacroMonitor can even replace the need to do proprietary research, answering urgent questions that would otherwise require a survey or focus group. Finally, the MacroMonitor can cost-effectively provide information for all those other areas that cannot be your institution's priorities at this time.
Estimating Market Size
The MacroMonitor's results are projectable to all economic households nationwide. Therefore, one can estimate the number of U.S. households that have any product and use their reported dollar amounts for the product to estimate total dollars. And because results are projectable to the entire United States, one can also make projections for any region, subpopulation, or other groups. One may create, append, or apply specific footprints, market areas, and data for urban/suburban/rural, MSA, DMA, and many other geographic delineations. It is even easy for a financial institution to apply custom weights for projecting results to specific, smaller geographies, or CFD will do it for a reasonable fee.
Comparing Competitors' Customers and Former Customers
The MacroMonitor gathers data about household awareness and current and past use of nearly 200 of the top banks, insurance companies, consumer finance companies, mutual fund companies, and full-service and discount stockbrokerages, among other types of institutions. Users may compare these specific institutions' customers, former customers, and recent customers for demographic, balance-sheet, and attitudinal differences.
(Korean Inquiries)
(Japanese site)