The NTF Group

HISTORY

In 1995, founding directors Joan Nelson and Greg Taylor, were General Managers within a national research company. Joan had a vision to create an Analytic Consulting division which could help clients integrate and commercially exploit their customer, sales and research data, through the application of sophisticated analytic modelling and qualitative insights.

Joan pitched the idea to the research company’s regional Director, who explained this concept didn’t fit with their business model. Greg found the proposition so compelling, he resigned his position that afternoon and NTF came into existence. Joan joined Greg shortly afterwards and here we are, 20 years later.

WHAT MAKES US UNIQUE

We leverage our understanding of your organisational, digital and/or marketing objectives with our unique data collection tools and methods of analysis. As a result, our clients can spend more time ACTING on the information, rather than making sense of it.

Our business philosophy is to rethink the "typical" consulting model by combining attributes of management consulting, IT consulting, market research insights, cutting edge analytic techniques and creative agency services to help clients drive business results by solving strategic problems.

We occupy the space between the management consultancies and the research companies – we use the insights to implement actionable solutions tailored to your business.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

As a small business, NTF is acutely aware of the importance of every member of staff to us. All members of the Executive Management have worked at NTF for over 10 years and we have a shadow / pairing structure to mentor and train younger staff members, and in so doing mitigate the impact of senior members of staff leaving the firm. Further, NTF offers above industry levels of remuneration and working conditions.

The primary goal of NTF’s professional development program is to address a gap with respect to staff knowledge in the application of state-of-the-art analytical modelling and consumer insights techniques to clients’ business problems. We rely largely on in-house training because of the very limited number of external training courses covering the types of modelling techniques combined with state-of-the-art qualitative research we use. The focus of this training is to ensure all staff have adequate understanding of the ‘inner workings’ of the modelling technique and the contextual understanding of the clients problem for which the technique or method can be best applied e.g. do they really need the most accurate predictions or is it the explicability of patterns and trends which is more important?]. Ongoing professional development activities revolve around: 1. Internal training: The focus of this training is applying particular algorithms to client datasets and problems; 2. External research industry programs in areas of changing industry practice (for example, 'gamification' of survey design); 3. Bespoke external training: external partners are used for development in: presentation skills, and scrum/agile project management techniques.

At NTF we help our clients improve their organisation's competitive positioning and profitability, through assisting senior management in making superior decisions in:

Customer Management
Marketing
Operations
In order to do this, we work closely with clients to determine what information sources and data currently exist, and where the information gaps are. Once further research and data requirements are identified and fulfilled, all information is integrated and enriched by state-of-the-art marketing science techniques.We have expert analysts and data modellers who conduct all analysis in house. They have a range of very sophisticated data analysis methods and modelling capability.

The NTF Group has its own in-house capability in terms of online survey development. We have developed in-house several web applications for use in online research, including an online focus group bulletin board, and online survey software with the capability to conduct complex choice modelling studies online.

The NTF Group works with clients to optimally acquire and utilise customer insights and associated data more efficiently and effectively. This means: generating deep qualitative insights, implementing sophisticated quantitative research designs, integrating and interpreting both quantitative research and internal data (e.g. activity costs or other operational data, customer records, transaction and call centre data, etc) and executing predictive, classification, network mapping and optimisation modelling.

The results are often presented in the form of decision support software or customized apps to provide management with a "what if" capability and disseminate new insights to their organisation.

Some of these are highly imaginative, such as the interactive model using a map of Shanghai with drag-and-drop buildings for Shanghai Housing which we conducted for the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation – which not only predicted with great accuracy but is still being used as an internal training tool for the way research can be provided.

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