Return on investment is a tricky thing to prove sometimes. In marketing, advertising, and market research, ROI can be especially elusive, but we all know it’s there. What if a market research expenditure could not only show positive ROI but actually be a profit center for your business? Crazy, right? Not necessarily.
Imagine if you could acquire a large library of market information for a low fixed price and then “sell” off pieces of it to your clients or constituents over and over. Your library spend just became an information investment, and behold, your research tools just became a profit center. The Knowledge Center platform, which features the content of some of the most trusted names in market research—Packaged Facts, Kalorama Information, Simba Information—offers just such a possibility.
This Fall, Knowledge Centers are adding project charge-back functionality, which will allow users to assign and track specific research downloads and the market price of those data sets to specific projects or clients. Subscribers to the platform can, therefore, assign specific research expenditures to projects, tasks or clients and, in the aggregate, bill or collect more than the subscription price. Since with Knowledge Centers you pay one fixed price and use as much as you like, you can extract almost limitless value from your investment AND provide your clients and constituents with valuable data and insights that they would not ordinarily have access to—a true win-win.
The chargeback functionality involves more than just differently organized usage statistics. Downloads are actually assigned prices and these prices are not arbitrary. They are the prices set by the industry leading buy-by-the-slice platform Profound. So you’re tracking the actual value at retail for specific content sets. You can say with confidence to your client that this is what you’d pay if you’d bought the data on Profound.
Even if the profit –center scenario isn’t a possibility for your organization, tracking of usage at this level of detail and with this certainty of quantification can have great benefits. With the tool, you can allocate budget responsibility by department or team with great specificity. You can also quantify (using price/value) your organization’s level of interest in various industries or industry topics. Or, you can use it just to feel good about how much you saved by being a smart shopper!
