We began our research to find a new approach to understanding investment trends and, most important, how to have more advance warning of significant changes in the markets, good or bad, and well before the event actual became reality.. Over the past three years we have been fortunate to have several highly talented people join our group, each bringing a new type of expertise to TrendPointers.

TrendPointers is a growing organization, now with 8 professionals, from an eclectic array of information and communications disciplines – marketing research, information processing technology, consumer and business marketing and media communications.

Our expertise stems from decades of working with many of the world’s leading consumer and business marketers and manufacturers; companies that have spent billions of dollars learning how to harness information to create and deliver messages to their customers that will inform, educate and move them to action.

TrendPointers has adopted and adapted the information collection and analysis practices from consumer behavior and marketing research and applied them to managing the flow of investment related information. Our staff is dedicated to finding, analyzing, distilling and reporting the most crucial information that can impact investment success.

I have been in the marketing and business research industry for over 35 years, in senior research and management at Quaker Oats, Sears Roebuck and Research consulting firms. Before founding TrendPointers I was Executive Vice President of NFO Worldwide, one of the largest marketing research firms in the world. I have been involved in designing or managing thousands of research projects commissioned by leading businesses, to provide richer and timelier insights about their consumers, markets, and future opportunities for their business.

Over the years I have been able to observe many different approaches to intelligence gathering, and have identified the common elements of what I call “information success”. Most clients have similar questions, but developing effective techniques to seek out the most useful information is as much an art as it is a science. Pure statistics could never predict the future, nor could isolated opinions. Sometimes, the most elaborate analyses only served to obscure the data. But, a blend of simple yet precisely targeted information gathering and analytical techniques could often produce the best insights.

By recognizing the jigsaw puzzle nature of information quests, we can piece together patterns of information that single dimension analyses often miss.

The answer was to look the economic environment in a new way, by applying information analysis techniques from other disciplines rather than the traditional methods.

We connected the dots from our collective research and trend experience and knew there was a way to uncover the clues to future economic behavior. Thus TrendPointers.

For the past 25+ years Mike has leveraged his consumer behavior expertise to uncover unique insights and behavioral patterns that drive winning economic and marketing strategies producing outstanding results for raving fan clients across industry sectors. For 16 years he served as the President and Managing Partner of CFM Direct, an integrated marketing agency, responsible for achieving $17 MM in net revenue by 2006. In 2007, Mike drove the sale of CFM Direct to Merkle Inc. and successfully led the integration of the agency and its clients into the Merkle organization through 2008. Mike is currently a managing partner of TrendPointers LLC and responsible for leading revenue growth, market penetration and client relationship development.

Glenn is a consumer insights specialist. Glenn led the development of a proprietary software process that provides real time targeting online using custom “risk” and “consumer response” models. In his marketing capacity, Glenn worked with a variety of leading consumer marketing firms, including Disney, eMusic, BMG, Chevrolet, Chase Bank and others.

Glenn also served as Vice President Consumer Insights at Merkle Agency Services and Senior Vice President Marketing & Data Solutions with Econometrics, Inc. and managed teams that developed highly targeted marketing programs, including email and online based initiatives that leveraged customer data in order to improve retention and marketing acquisition efficiencies.
Glenn launched his career, with Kraft-General Foods and J. Walter Thompson. He is a member of the American Marketing Association, a graduate of Indiana State University and completed Graduate Studies at Xavier University.