Hello, I'm Larry Weiss. I've been using the Linescale approach in my own product development business for many years. Our goal with Linescale has been to create and continually improve a sophisticated research system that can be used by any competent marketing person. Many years experience developing large-scale automated systems taught us how to create a low-cost, powerful, fast and insightful suite of tests, easy to use and requiring no special research knowledge.  Here's the team...

Larry Weiss

Larry is the founder of Linescale. Over his long career he created many highly usable mass-market products and services. As Head of the Development Division of Citibank and Citicorp, Larry led the creation and development of innovative consumer banking products and services around the world. Larry's pioneering work in developing Citibank's ATMs and online banking applications was followed by design of the Automated Postal Centers and Internet applications for the US Postal Service. Larry also contributed to design of the Priceline.com travel reservation system.

More recently Larry has focused on developing and refining the twenty marketing and advertising research applications of the Linescale Expert System, while at the same time consulting with client companies including Sonic Drive-In, Citibank, Aetna Insurance, Priceline.com, FreshDirect, Walmart.com, 1-800-Flowers, Pitney Bowes, Kraft Foods, Lenox Hill Hospital, Lincoln Center, Kodak, Chase Bank, Jenny Craig, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Simon & Schuster and Marriott Hotels and Resorts.

He learned his trade at Pillsbury and General Foods, doing innovative marketing research as Marketing Research Manager for Maxwell House, then as new product development manager and product group manager. Among his varied packaged-goods creations were Underoos Children's Underwear, Cycle Dog Food and Cocoa Pebbles and Fruity Pebbles Cereal (see list at: http://gort.net/ProductIndex.htm).

Larry Weiss has degrees in Psychology and Philosophy and Experimental Psychology from Boston University, and over a dozen U.S. Patents.

Dan Axtell

Dan Axtell serves as Linescale Chief Technologist. Dan specializes in finding unorthodox solutions to unconventional problems, and has designed the software used for the Linescale system by leveraging open source tools with an agile programming methodology. Dan follows a minimalist design philosophy that complements the "less is more" approach of the Linescale system. Dan is an expert web developer, with a strong background in Windows applications, unix system software and embedded applications. Dan has been programming professionally since 1991 and is a graduate of the Stevens Institute of Technology with a degree in physics.

Donna Porter

Donna is Linescale's Operations Chief. Donna brings many years of experience developing user-centered software products and services for personal computers, work stations, Internet, mobile devices, touch-screen kiosks, interactive voice response systems and industrial machine controls.  She consulting in software design and development for  AT&T, Verizon, American Express, United States Postal Service, Pitney Bowes and Sealed Air Corporation. Donna was a Vice President/Creative Director at Citibank's Development Division where she directed development of consumer banking products and services.  Earlier, as a founding member of Scholastic Software and a former high school teacher herself, she helped pioneer the development of award-winning educational software products for students and teachers, then went on to create educational software products for consumer markets.

Donna holds a B.S. degree in Education from Northern Arizona University with English and Psychology majors.
                                                                                          

Eric Wright

Eric Wright is a software engineer with over 12 years of experience designing, developing and marketing applications for the web. Eric founded his own company in 2004, specializing in customized software solutions. He has built soup-to-nut systems for corporations and non-profit organizations alike in many different industries including manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, film, radio and research. Some of his past clients include Hewlett-Packard, Amphenol Corporation, Verizon Communications, and Cox Radio. Eric is a Sun Microsystems Certified Java Programmer but has an entire arsenal of programming languages under his belt. Most of all Eric is a problem solver and knows how to use the right technology to get the job done

Marv Weiss

Marv is our reporting expert. He creates specialty reports based upon clients' needs and automates standard reporting techniques. 

Marv has a BSME from Northeastern University, MS Eng. and MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is a registered professional engineer in NY, MA and ME.

Jim Dorsch

Jim Dorsch is a Linescale Client Service partner with clients primarily in consumer packaged goods. Jim has 30 years CPG Business and Product Management experience with Fortune 100 companies. Highlights include developing and launching  new products such as Cottonelle, Underoos, Prego, V8 new packaging and Sandwich Stackers.

At Campbell's Soup Jim created business systems and marketing innovation across the globe as Campbell’s Soup International CMO, and he led grocery, condiments and beverages businesses to successful profit performance.

Jim has 12 years of consulting for J&J, Kraft, Nestle and Wyeth and other major companies on functional foods and ingredients. He specializes in developing Brand IP and product prototypes for unique nutrition food products.

Bob Longman

Bob Longman founded Lunalux, Inc., a strategic marketing and development firm in 1978. His major clients have include Citigroup, Bank One, NYSE, IBM, UMG, Pitney Bowes and Pepsico. His work has concentrated in product development, branding, communications and market research.

Among his unique strengths, Bob is a specialist in innovative applications of quantitative techniques and psychometrics.

Katie Weiss

Katie is Linescale’s CFO and Administration Officer. She previously was Chief of Staff at Citibank International Personal Banking Division, Chief of Staff for the Citicorp Development Division and directed The Lab, Citibank’s Customer Interaction and Consumer Research facility.  Prior to Citibank, Katie worked at financial projects and audit for Time, Inc. and Haskins & Sells.  Katie is engaged in not-for-profit activities as a member of the UN Committee on Ageing and is Board Chair of Aging in America, a senior services agency in New York City. She has been named Trustee of the Year by the NY State Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.

Katie has a BA from Wellesley College and studied at Dartmouth College. She earned M.S. in Accounting from NYU and New York State CPA certification.

Todd Lilly

SUMMARY of Linescale Technology

FAST
Linescale® is very fast . Answers in days, not weeks.

COST
Linescale is affordable. It's designed to encourage you to run repeat surveys. This lets you improve based on immediate learning.

SUCCESS
Try, and try again. Success comes from iteration. Linescale speed and affordability lets you increase your chances of  winning!

NORMS - BREAKTHROUGH, STRONG, GOOD, ABOVE PAR, BELOW PAR, POOR
Linescale has a huge data base across a wide array of products, new products and services. We know what the numbers mean! Banking, On-line Auctions, Coffee, Retail, Supermarket Brands, AVR Customer Service, On-line Retail, Financial Services, Hotels, Online News Services, Quick Service Restaurants, Pet Food, Baby Food, Designer Bedding, Children's Underwear, ATMs, Weight Reduction Programs, Postal Service Kiosks, Cereal, On-line Couponing, Telecom, Postal and Mailing Services, Investment Adivice, Office Equipment, Small Business Services, Household Products, Credit Cards, Concepts, Benefits, Direct Mail Pieces, Positioning Statements, Storyboards, Finished Commercials.

BEHAVIOR CHANGE
Linescale tests in direct comparison with each consumer’s current favorite brands or practices. If they prefer your product or promise to what they are doing today, you know something important.

DEPTH, RICHNESS and VERBATIMS
Reports give in-depth consumer response organized to quickly let you understand who likes or dislikes your program and why. Consumer’s get engaged with Linescale’s Unique Interactive survey – with no group pressure, no interviewer, no moderator. They let you know what they honestly feel and why. In their own words, consumers let you know why they rated your program as they did. Organized Verbatims give texture to what’s going on in your customers’ minds.

More Information

Linescale is an innovative highly interactive web-based survey technique for screening, improving, developing and evaluating new products and services and refurbishing existing products. It is the fast, low-cost Internet evolution of consumer laboratory systems used by major packaged goods and financial services companies for decades.

What does it do?
This interactive development tool first guides generation and improvement of the concept itself, then gives you laser-like feedback on development of the product or service and its marketing components.


Linescore ® A unique and reliable assessment and report of how your product or service will do.

With Linescale, you will get a Linescore business report.  The Linescore is a concise performance summary which highlights the percent of respondents who will likely be customers for the product. Senior management and investors find the objective Linescore summary useful in evaluating whether to fund a venture.

Linescale is a behavior predictive development tool, not an attitude measure. Target customers actively rank how a new product concept or idea stacks up against their current two favorite brands or practices in the space, how the execution of the idea works – at any level of finish - and what competitors they will likely switch away from. Linescale goes beyond "do customers like it" and predicts whether customers will buy and use it over time. Now you can rapidly and inexpensively make sure you have the concept and offering right and the marketing expression optimum BEFORE you spend the big dollars and time in production and introduction.

Linescale delivers fast, reliable scores, verbatim responses and diagnostics that summarize interest, probable trial, repeat and depth of repeat. The analysis shows which customers want the product and why, how to improve it, who hates it and why, and what it needs to fix it.

Speed? If you need quick but quantitative insights you can finalize the test offerings on Tuesday and get a complete report Friday.

The Linescore tells you;

701 to 800 Excellent
601 to 700 Extremely good concept, great execution
501 to 600 Very good concept, some areas for improvement
401 to 500 Good concept, but needs work
301 to 400 Problem areas, needs significant improvement
200 to 300  Major Deficiencies

Why not just do Focus Groups?

Focus groups can smoke out issues, anecdotes and customer language. Focus groups have their use, but focus groups cannot deliver rigorous quantitative and qualitative evaluation and diagnosis of the concept and product. One of the values of focus groups is the ability to ask clarification questions as you learn from consumer comments. Linescale's iterative approach incorporates this positive feature of focus groups. As you learn, you can ask the new questions that arise, and get a quantitative as well as qualitative answer.

Linescale Concept Developer and Linescale Product Developer are pure development tools designed to help you build successful new products and fix old products. Inexpensive rapid iteration is the route to development success. Make bets and see if they pay off with the consumer - long before you get to market.


Linescale Marketing Report Card
Linescale Marketing Report Card monitors your brand's positioning, package, product, price, advertising and customer service at a local, regional or national level, and by market segment. The Linescale interactive preference based technique is a fast, iterative low cost way to monitor marketing mix effectiveness and customer satisfaction.  The development tools easily adapt to continuous monitoring of all elements of your marketing mix as time, executional effectiveness and comnpetitive pressures bring need for change.

A brief Technical Note for market researchers and background for users of market research:

Market Research scaling methods over the past 60 years were greatly influenced by work done by Pilgrim and Kamen for the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps during World War ll. Kraft General Foods, Pillsbury, General Mills and many of the other great packaged food companies of the mid-twentieth century - and their advertising agencies - adopted hedonic scale techniques pioneered there. Classic research used nine-point scales, either balanced or unbalanced, to measure food preferences of military personnel. Part of the aim was to measure preferences for categories of foods. For example, were rutabagas preferred to parsnips? Potatoes to rice? Some foods score high; some low. In this classic testing of apples versus oranges, they settled on metric scaling as a convenient, reliable way to measure hedonic norms for categories of foods. These scales were later carried into post-war commercial research for the food industry as packaging and branding of food marketing rolled out.

Experimentation was done by the more capable research departments, but was generally limited to the number of scale items - nine, seven, six or five items- word choice, balanced or unbalanced scales, graphic representation of the scales, compression and expansion of the psychological space, etc. But with rare exception, such as Eric Marder's constant sum technique. metric scales have been industry practice.

But scale scores have severe limitations for practical use. Metric scales need large numbers of respondents. Why? They are very "noisy". The noise stems from individual differences. Some people tend to score things high; some score them low. Some score big differences between things, some small. Worse, the same individual will score the same item higher or lower at different times. The net effect is unintended differences that need to be canceled out by large numbers and statistics. Compounding the problem, each product category also carries its own norms; desserts and novelties score high; root vegetables and necessities score low. This forces serious researchers to use large samples. Traditional solutions to this problem include looking at "top box' or "top two boxes". This cancels out much of the scale noise, but also loses information. Canceling out the noise with large samples gets expensive quickly. The dilemma has been forego research, do focus groups or spend a bundle for a large-sample one time study.

Why not directly measure preference by ranking? Conjoint analysis is a more "pairwise" approach, but in practice is expensive and tedious for respondents, which compromises crispness of data. Classic metric scales are an attempt to infer preference from scale values.