Using marketing research to develop brand positioning strategy
We’re moving on!
With the “retirement” of Dr. Cleve Corlett, Brand Planning has been folded into Allium Research and Analytics under the enormously talented Joy Levin. Joy and Cleve have been working together for the past three years, so the transition has been seamless. Cleve will continue to play a consultative role.
Please reach out to Joy at joy.levin@alliumresearch.com or visit the company website at www.AlliumResearch.com.
Many thanks to our numerous wonderful clients over the past 22 years – thank you for trusting us to elevate your brands in the marketplace.
Testimonials: Client Success Stories
“Of the dozens of research people I’ve worked with over the last twenty years, Cleve sets the gold standard for great partnership. He is quick to understand both the goals of the project and the needs of the people running it. He is a really good listener, and very adept at taking in different viewpoints and pet theories and finding common ground without compromising the integrity of the project. He works with the findings to go beyond the big insights to actionable recommendations that help the client down the path to execution.”
Liz Levy Ward
Marketing Consultant
Flexible Executives
“Cleve brings a great combination of analytic rigor and unbiased analysis in conjunction with the ability to align his work with business needs. During his work on our project, Cleve proved and disproved our hypotheses through his studies as an unbiased third party with statistical rigor, and then took the additional step of understanding how the resulting outputs fit into the business and the marketing story we were trying to tell. He was able to develop a complex questionnaire with a broad range of parameters leaving the ability to go down many channels of analysis as our understanding of the situation grew to develop a robust, well thought out analytic argument to be used in our marketing materials. I would recommend Cleve and hope to work with him again.”
Mark Nyquist
Vice President of Product
Connexions Loyalty
“I hired Cleve Corlett (Brand Planning) this past year to do a comprehensive brand study for Colonial Williamsburg. The project was quite complex and as a result it took a few twists and turns along the way. Cleve was always professional, never flustered and took all of our changes and needs in stride. At the end, the research was very illuminating and translated into actionable steps to grow our business. Cleve is extremely personable and has the rare ability to gain the respect of many diverse business leaders. I would highly recommend Cleve for any assignment requiring research and/or strategic planning.”
Janet Eason
Director of Marketing Communications
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
“Cleve knows the appropriate research techniques to uncover what customers really think and feel. He also can translate this customer understanding into actionable results for his clients.”
Bill Carlson
Vice President, Consumer Marketing
Choice Hotels International
“Cleve’s capacity to engender trust together with his compassion and humor enable him to draw out foundational issues and motivators in even the most sensitive situations. The insights he gained have changed the national approach to promoting organ and tissue donation.”
Melissa Devenny
Managing Director
Donate Life America
“Cleve is a great listener — he carefully assesses the client’s needs and recommends the appropriate approach given our budget, timing and learning needs. Most important, he listens to consumers when they share their experience with and opinions about brands. In my experience working with Cleve over the past four years, I’ve always found him to be highly responsive, proactive and clear in his communication throughout the research and planning process. He’s a great collaborator who works well with researchers, creatives, account people and clients at all levels. He’s a consummate professional who works well under pressure and readily adapts to change.”
Wendy Hagen
Senior Vice President
Porter Novelli / Washington
“’Is Cleve going to be there?’ was a commonly asked question when scheduling meetings with clients. His ability to get to the core issue was invaluable to our clients. Consistently, Cleve provided insight and strategic leadership that lead to very effective “on target” communications. A very effective strategist and a great guy to work with.”
Scott Stoughton
Account Director
Arnold Worldwide
“Cleve has a wonderful ability to tap into key consumer insights and attitudes. And, with his understanding of the brand-building process, he is able to translate the information into strategically-based briefs that make our jobs easier. Cleve is also a great guy to work with.”
Scott Mackey
Creative Director, Mackey, Ink
(formerly with Arnold Worldwide, GSD&M, Earle Palmer Brown)
“Cleve made the murky world of branding accessible to a newbie client and his work provided the foundation for a terrific product for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.”
Dolores McDonagh
Vice President, Membership Development
National Trust for Historic Preservation
“Cleve is a terrific strategic partner. For our clients, Cleve inevitably becomes their trusted advisor in guiding and monitoring their strategic vision. Part of this is because he is a great listener. Cleve takes the time to clearly understand the clients’ needs and then conscientiously develops strategic research programs to make certain those needs are met. He is a key player for the client that they come to trust as one of their own. Cleve is extremely well experienced in the area of research but he communicates and presents his findings in an appealing and totally understandable manner that all types of audiences – whether marketing savvy or not – can totally grasp. Big River is a big fan of Cleve Corlett.”
Fred Moore
President
Big River Advertising
“Carton Donofrio Partners has worked with Cleve Corlett for the past seven years on dozens of major client research assignments. The quality of his work has been outstanding, always delivering insight beyond the standard reporting of findings. Cleve is the consummate professional, dedicated to producing an accurate, quality product and delivering results on time and within agreed-upon budgets.”
Jamie Rice
Chief Strategy Officer, Partner
Carton Donofrio Partners, Inc.
“Brand Planning recently completed a usability test of our public website. Their proposal was very well done, comprehensive, and met our needs. They were very accommodating and thorough in the development of the usability test protocol. The usability test was carried out very professionally and the report that was provided was done in a timely manner and extremely well done. We used the results of the usability test immediately in making needed website design adjustments. We have been extremely pleased with the work of Brand Planning, would use them again, and will recommend them highly to others.”
Michael Lambur, Ph.D.
eXtension Evaluation and Research Leader & Research Professor
Department of Agricultural and Extension Education
“Our school found working with Brand Planning to be a very collaborative, interactive process. Cleve Corlett was able to take our questions and concerns and craft them into market surveys that have yielded very useful information for our organization.”
Leslie Lawley Meyer
Trustee Chair of the Admissions and Enrollment Task Force
Board of Trustees
Holton-Arms School
“We’ve been more than pleased with our partnership with Cleve and his team at Brand Planning, LLC. They’ve created, conducted and analyzed two consumer surveys for us, each time delivering the results on our tight deadlines and in easily digestible language that makes sense to us and our key stakeholders.”
Lindsey Smith
COO, KW Savings Co.
Director of Public and Member Relations
The Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, Inc.
“There have been several times in my career when Cleve has literally been the light at the end of the tunnel. The light didn’t come from the results he presented or the confidence he inspired in the validity of his findings; those things are par for the course with Cleve. The light came from the way he overcame the resistance in the room among those who just knew they already had the answer. Or even more impressive, when he had to face a creative team that could not imagine how their audience was unmoved by their work. In every case we all came out of a meeting with Cleve feeling like we’d learned something new about an audience. Even more, we knew what to do to be successful. Cleve never delivered negative findings. He delivered understanding about how to make what we had work better.”
Jerry McCann
Account Supervisor
Carton Donofrio Partners, Inc.
“Cleve Corlett did an excellent job for Holy Cross Hospital in a very short timeframe of conducting focus group research to determine former patients’ perceptions of the care they received. In pre-focus group meetings with hospital leadership, he gained a thoroughly in-depth knowledge of the issues Holy Cross was seeking to understand and developed facilitator guidelines to thoroughly explore these issues with focus group participants. Additionally, he was able to quickly recruit participants of differing ages, gender and ethnicities to create several diverse groups that reflected a representative sample of the hospital’s overall patient population. Finally, Cleve produced an excellent written report that summarized and consolidated the issues participants discussed and included recommendations based on these findings to assist the hospital in developing a customer service initiative. I highly recommend Cleve and Brand Planning and was very pleased with the high quality of his work.”
Diane Meyers
Vice President, Communications & Marketing
Holy Cross Hospital
“Cleve has performed quantitative market research for Inova for the last four years. He is personable and great at breaking the information down into a format that even the least “market research inclined” audience understands. He also is able to discuss the implications and opportunities associated with the results. His work is also a terrific value!”
Lynn Hopkins Cantwell
AVP, Marketing
Inova Health System
“We have worked with Brand Planning and Cleve Corlett specifically for well over a decade and cannot say enough about his skills, insight, professionalism and timelines. His thought process and ability to assure we get the true consumer insight and feedback have been essential to assuring that our creative product is always relevant and resonates with consumers. And going beyond that, he has also become an integral part of our brand development team. I only give recommendations when they are true and well deserved. I can’t begin to recommend Brand Planning and Cleve enough.”
John G. Most
President, CEO
MOST Brand Development + Advertising
“Brand Planning took great care to provide a very detailed study that accounted for the nuances of our industry. The team was great to work with and took the time for look for multiple, resourceful solutions to our research challenges.”
Lindsay McIntee
Marketing Manager
Quarles
I recommend Cleve Corlett and Brand Planning without hesitation!
We asked for help identifying the optimum brand positioning and messaging strategy to help reinvigorate our brand and increase donations. Cleve and his team not only made the process easy and efficient but were a pleasure to work with every step of the way. In addition to answering the questions we asked, they identified powerful insights we would not have uncovered on our own. Cleve also delved deeper into areas outside the scope of the project because they were critical to our path forward. I could praise Cleve Corlett and Brand Planning all day long, but to put it simply, they deliver.
Michelle Staudenmeier
Assistant Director, Advertising & Brand
Friends of the National Zoo
“I was pleased to partner with Brand Planning to do a deep dive into the MyEyeDr. customer’s perceptions around the products and services we offer. Cleve and team were a great resource in developing a robust feedback instrument and then delivering a product with a lot of meaningful insights. When we are ready to repeat this project, I expect to come back to Brand Planning!”
Diane Vaccaro
Chief Marketing Officer
MyEyeDr., Capital Vision Services
“I am blown away by the absolute professionalism, knowledge and expertise provided by the Brand Planning organization lead by Dr. Cleve Corlett, PhD. His thoughtful collaborative effort in defining a powerful national survey with impeccable timeliness and delivery of the final report are invaluable to our research. We are looking forward to our next engagement with this organization.”
Joe Sinacore
Director of Education and Development
National Kidney Registry
What does brand development entail and why is it important?
Our brand development services focus on creating a unique and compelling identity for your business. We conduct thorough research to understand your target audience and competitors, and then develop a brand strategy that differentiates you from the competition. This includes creating a brand name, logo, tagline, and brand guidelines that represent your values and resonate with your audience.
Get in Touch with Brand Planning
757-258-2741
ccorlett@brandplanning.com