Research to Drive Decisions

        
Research Perspectives is led by Christopher Brown.

I have character and skills that have positioned me as a leader at every stage of my career. I have the perspective you need to deliver actionable insights for your organization. I have especially deep experience in the education sector.

Early Days:

In the early stages, I worked in sales and marketing and quickly gravitated to market research as part of a leading Advertising company, Wolf Associates, in upstate New York. I served a diverse clientele with quantitative and qualitative research and strategic planning facilitation. 

After moving to New York, I went to work with the venerable Market Facts organization and then BAI Global, both now part of Synovate.  Here is where I honed my research skills as a supplier to financial services and consumer packaged goods companies, focusing on a broad array of research including Attitude and Usage studies, Concept and Product Testing, Brand Positioning, Win/Loss Research, Voice-of-the-Customer and much more.                                                                                     

Emerging Leadership:

My experience, and especially my people skills, brought me to work on the client side of of a growing educational publisher, Prentice Hall (later Pearson) where I quickly grew into a Senior Leadership role in a period of unprecedented change and growth.  With my remit as SVP of Market Research, I helped transition the business to digital and transformed the research function to include a more coherent workflow and a wider range of quantitative and qualitative methods to deliver high-impact insights into customer needs. I trained and led a highly effective team of 15 direct reports and reduced costs by 20% within a $2M operating budget.

My experience led me to become an in-demand speaker at industry and professional meetings and to serve on Boards of Directors and in other industry roles where I have been able to give back and promote innovation and best practices.

Steady Growth:

Next, I developed and directed an international research program, with a $5M grant budget, to support academic research and innovations in teaching quality, innovative assessment, language learning and adaptive learning technologies. In this period I also went back to school to round out my own academic background, gaining an advanced degree in Psychology.

Our program supported education research and education reform policy discussions, working with partners like the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Friday Institute  for Innovation, Stanford University,  the Gates Foundation, the  Hewlett Foundation and the National Academy of Education (part of the National Research Council). 

In addition to grant support, I led a collaboration with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) that identified, documented and celebrated Exemplar 21st Century Schools.

Continued Excellence:

In 2015, I took on a hands-on role with Wiley, where I was responsible for Customer Experience and Insights, Market Research and Program Evaluation and Efficacy for the global higher education division. In this role I designed and led a strategic process for identifying, prioritizing and implementing research across multiple STEM product lines. 

This involved quantitative segmentation and qualitative research supporting Persona development, a high volume of quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, online qualitative boards and other research for multiple internal clients, drawing out actionable insights and strategies to improve customer experience and efficacy, especially for digital learning platforms.

Recent Start Up:

In mid 2017, I started consulting again - something close to my heart in every role I have had, but this time under the aegis of my own LLC, Research Perspectives. I began part-time with Great Minds, to identify market research, & customer experience research for this extraordinary preK-12 enterprise.  I have enjoyed this experience so much that I am now consulting full-time.