How to Use the MacroMonitor

For more than 40 years, leading financial institutions, corporations, associations, consulting firms, universities and government agencies have used the MacroMonitor to develop data-based solutions to their crucial consumer and customer-related challenges.

Strategic Planning

MacroMonitor is often used to drive the strategic-planning process. Your strategic initiatives benefit from the comprehensive information, high-quality data, and insightful analyses readily available with the MacroMonitor. From market sizing for specific products and services to understanding consumer needs, behaviors, and channel preferences—all are accessible in a single-source dataset. Demographics and key financial attitudes round out a holistic approach to strategy building you can use with the utmost confidence.

MacroMonitor's unique ability to replicate target populations in prior data waves provides the added advantage of trended data. Trends reveal how a target has evolved over time. Consumer Financial Decisions (CFD) analysts' knowledge and experience add insights to these trends to project how various targets will evolve.

Plan Implementation

After determining a compelling course of action to achieve your organization's goals, you need detailed data and information to guide implementation. With time and with experience, the CFD team has developed a wide range of resources and collaborations to help clients succeed. The tools and services that we can provide follow:

Proprietary Segmentations: MacroMonitor's complete coverage of consumer finances means that you can replicate and trend most internal segmentations. Doing so enables you to explore a wealth of data to gain additional consumer-segment insights.
Dedicated Analysis: CFD's top-notch analysts are available to work with you on data consulting, segmentation, custom reports, and multivariate analyses.
Enhanced Customer Files: Subscribers frequently use the MacroMonitor to model derived characteristics onto customer files. Several of our data partners rely on MacroMonitor to profile their segments in numerous ways.
Linkages and Appends: The MacroMonitor has long-standing relationships with various third-party data providers to leverage geodemographic, product-use, credit-bureau, census, and other consumer-classification tools for our clients.
Survey Design Consulting: More than 40 years of experience in all aspects of the design, fielding, and data process of the MacroMonitor gives us a unique perspective about what works and what doesn't.
Recontact Surveys and Proprietary Questions: MacroMonitor encourages sponsors to provide suggestions for questionnaire design. Recently, proprietary questions have been available as an added feature (for an additional fee). MacroMonitor may also recontact respondents and ask additional questions to learn about how they have changed since the initial interview.
Customer Oversamples: The MacroMonitor is administered to a cross-section of your customers to provide you with additional understanding about who your customers are and the role your firm plays in their financial lives. You provide the sample. We attend to all details and deliver a ready-to-use data set.

Target Profiling

Using the MacroMonitor's exhaustive demographic variables, subscribers can create a complete demographic profile of any group of consumers. For example, one could profile mutual fund owners, frequent security traders, individual life-insurance purchasers with an agent relationship, premium credit-card owners, recent checking-account acquirers, and so forth for any financial product, service, or channel.

Demographics: Included are age, income, education, sex, race, marital status, children, occupation, employment status, business ownership, union and association membership, recent major life events, and Life Stages.
Attitudes: More than 200 financial attitudes are included—most are trendable.
Balance Sheet: Summaries of financial product and service use for total assets, debt, net worth, and the like are available.
Behaviors: 100 recent and likely financial behaviors are measured.
Institution Use: Competitive intelligence is collected for more than 200 institutions.

Balance Sheets

The MacroMonitor contains incidences and dollar amounts for all financial products. Some variables are calculated—such as net worth, total investable assets, total savings, and total debt; respondents are asked to specify exact dollar amounts, not dollars, within a range. A complete household balance sheet can be computed for any target population, such as millionaire households, households with more than 50% of available home equity, Boomers, households with Boomerang children, single parents, dual-income families, or union members. Subscribers may use these product inventories and balances to identify customer-acquisition prospects or to suggest cross-selling opportunities.

Analyze a Data Warehouse or Update Customer-Information Files

As more institutions invest in data warehousing and the use of appended customer data, the overarching need is for an analytic engine to form, refine, and test hypotheses about meaningful relationships among financial attitudes, behaviors and channels for any segment. Once a hypothesis has confirmation, an algorithm can be applied to the warehoused data to identify the best prospects. MacroMonitor attitudes (or factors) may also be appended using a similar technique.

Identify Channel Preference and Use

The MacroMonitor has questions about channel preference and use: (aided) awareness, current use, past use, and recent purchase at specific institutions. Data are collected for households' primary institution for depositories, insurance and consumer finance companies, and investment firms, as well as the products and services the household obtains there. Use of, and interest in, alternative channels to access financial services is also measured: personal computers, smartphones and Peer-to-Peer payment technologies.

Create Segmentations

The MacroMonitor makes it easy to create, append, validate, or link many types of segmentations from a variety of sources such as Life-Stage segments, age-by-income segments, or your custom segments.

Provide Background for Proprietary Research

Few organizations can afford proprietary research to support every area of their business. The MacroMonitor can provide background information in targeted areas for proprietary research, helping to focus efforts and resources where they will be most effective. Often the MacroMonitor substitutes for proprietary research by quickly answering urgent questions that would otherwise require a survey or focus group. Finally, the MacroMonitor is a cost-effective solution to provide information for business areas that are not a current priority.

Compare Competitors' Customers and Former Customers

The MacroMonitor gathers data about household awareness, current and past use of nearly 200 financial institutions, enabling subscribers to compare customers, former customers, and recent customers of specific institutions for demographic, balance-sheet, and attitudinal differences.