About the Center for Consumer Research and Analytics
We provide our student fellows valuable experiential learning opportunities working alongside real companies and provide our clients with actionable insights through consultative consumer research and analytics projects.
We're on the cutting edge of collection, interpretation, and analysis training our student fellows to generate actionable business insights from a wide range of methodologies like focus groups, surveys, analytics, videography, and physiological research.
Mission
- Provide our fellows with real-world consumer research & analytics experience by collaborating with a mix of large corporate, regional, local, and non-profit partners
- Develop our fellows into workforce-ready consumer researchers & analytics professionals with jobs lined-up prior to graduation
- Deliver high-quality actionable insights to our clients through our consultative process
Applied Learning
Projects are specifically designed to encourage students' skills in:
- Critical Thinking: ability to comprehensively explore issues, ideas, artifacts, events, and data before accepting or formulating opinions and conclusions.
- Information Literacy: ability to determine the extent of information needed as well as to identify, locate, evaluate, use, and share information effectively and responsibly for the problem at hand.
- Problem-Solving: ability to use processes for designing, evaluation, and implementing a strategy to answer a question or achieve a desired goal.
- Quantitative Literacy: ability to use reason and solve problems using a wide array of numerical data from authentic data from authentic contexts and business situations.
- Teamwork: ability to work effectively in teams including sharing ideas that advance the team, supporting and leading other team members, and fostering a constructive team environment.
Training Process
Our model is built on faculty and peer mentorship. Our faculty and senior fellows will help you develop both professional skills and grow as a person.
First-semester fellows are provided with a series of training seminars that help them get up to speed with our process, regardless of prior experience. These seminars include:
- Career opportunities from the CRA
- Qualitative research
- Quantitative research
- Data and Storytelling
- Working with clients
- Graphic design and presentations
Depending on their interests, our student fellows can expect to learn a wide variety of skills:
- Qualitative research skills (focus group moderation, interviewing, etc.)
- Quantitative research skills (online survey writing)
- Data analysis
- Project management
- Leadership
- Videography (cinematography, video editing, etc.)
- Physiological research (eye-tracking, facial expression analysis, etc.)
Final Presentation & Report
At the conclusion of the semester and after all data analysis is complete, our student fellows will prepare an insights driven report designed to provide you with not just data, but actionable recommendations based on your research objectives.
For each of our projects, we employ a mix of the following methods to best help our clients meet their research objectives:
- Quantitative Methods
- Survey
- Experiment
- Eye Tracking
- Facial Expression Analysis
- Qualitative Methods
- Focus Groups
- Interviews
- Observational Videography
- Secondary Research
Our student fellows have experience in conducting the following types of projects:
- Brand Assessment
- Positioning Analysis
- Product Testing
- Taste Testing
- Usage Testing
- Ad Testing
- Video
- TAGLine
- Concept Testing & Refinement
- Service Offerings
- Menu Boards
- Web store experiences