Abacus Direct, Broomfield, CO, a division of DoubleClick, will launch a series of syndicated market research products to produce information for its clients about consumers' Internet shopping habits.
“If we can tell our clients why their customers came to their site, we can help shape their media plan,” Riad Shalaby, vice president of market research at Abacus Direct, said in announcing the initiative last week.
The products will coincide with Abacus Direct's core market segments — catalog, retail, business-to-business, publishing and the Internet.
“The research initiative is more than a project; it is really an addition to our existing product offerings,” Shalaby said.
The project is called Developing Effective Customer Contact Strategies and was initiated because of client requests for detailed information about customer behavior.
Initially, the product will be available only to members of the Abacus Alliance transactional database, Shalaby said. It is possible that nonmembers could benefit from the research in the future, but there are no definite plans for that yet, he added.
The research syndicate is a collaboration among companies with similar business interests. To complete the project, Abacus Direct also has partnered with marketing research authority Dipankar Chakravarti and his University of Colorado staff.
Abacus Direct plans to have results from the research syndicate available to its clients by the first week of 2001.
