About

INTRODUCTION – Raison d’être

Image by Wouter Pinkhof

Does the world need another blog?  According to recent statistics from blog-tracking site Technorati, the blogosphere has doubled every six months for the last three years. That’s 175,000 new blogs per day worldwide. Technorati added its 50 millionth blog on July 31, 2006.

After several painful sessions of browbeating from my son and several friends, I suppose the answer is “if everyone else is doing it, so should you.  So get off your butt and do it!”  Those of you who know me understand that I never put anything in writing that I wouldn’t want the world to see.  Therefore, this is a painful process.  But I have been convinced that I have a ton of information in my head that is useful to many of my friends and clients.  So without disclosing any particulars, I will present, each week, my thoughts on my topics of expertise, namely figuring out how to concept and test the market/financial feasibility for places which may include:

Retail

Entertainment

Sports

Leisure / Hospitality

Gaming

Culture (Theaters/Museums)

In the last few years, mixed-use projects have included all six of these elements.  Figuring out how they interact from a market and financial point of view is what we do and what keeps me engaged.  (I bore easily).

For those of you who don’t know me, I have been in the business for over 25 years and as a friend once said to me, “you must be pretty good by now.”  Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know a whole lot about the subjects noted above.

Why Even Bother With Area/Consumer Research

When I worked at Federated Department Stores (which at the time had all the best department stores in its portfolio, including Bloomindales), we had two units for research and evaluation.  One was dubbed “area research” and included all demographics, competitive research and projected sales.  The other “consumer research” did focus groups and intercept interviews of our customers.    Our projections turned out + or – 5% because our models were that accurate.  I learned a great deal from working there, which I brought into my practice.  Namely, that if you think you know the answer, and it is YOUR PROJECT, you are probably wrong.  And that you need to get an independent evaluation or you will make a $100 million mistake.  Some projects are smaller and some are larger, but you get the picture.

In my next posting, I will talk about area research and how it is done.  Subsequent postings will discuss consumer research and some of the interesting stories we have surrounding this type of analysis.  Stay tuned……….all of these things are GOOD TO KNOW, and thus the name of my blog!

Jill Bensley is the President of JB Research Company.

To see Jill Bensley’s Resume, click here.

To see JB Research’s Qualifications, click here.

To see a list of articles published by Ms. Bensley, click here.

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