Dunkin' Donuts: The Inside Story

The Nov. 27th Morning Edition on NPR featured a story about Dunkin' Donuts new marketing campaign that pits it directly against Starbucks. The program interviewed the chief of strategy for Hill Holiday, the agency that created the new advertising campaigns.

What you didn't learn from the interview is revealed in Dona Vitale's book, Consumer Insights 2.0, which includes a detailed case study of how Dunkin' Donuts did its research and discovered how to differentiate itself from Starbucks and become a national brand.

Consumer Insights 2.0 tells readers how to set up a Consumer Insights department within a company and use its resources to develop new initiatives throughout an entire company. With the new attention to the Dunkin' Donuts campaigns which grew directly out of the work of the Consumer Insights department at Dunkin, other consumer companies may finally get the drift: that a marketing research department which serves a whole company has more power than having numerous departments and divisions do research on their own without integrating the findings.