Work with the Experts

Hi, I’m Fran Linnane, CEO and owner of TheResearchExperts, a marketing research, insights and consulting agency. For more than 35 years I have led, designed and executed thousands of studies representing more than $700 Million worth of market research impacting billions of dollars of revenue.

In August 2022, I finally became an entrepreneur and made the transition from corporate America into my own consulting business.

Given my background helping fortune 500 companies like AT&T, Kodak, Coca Cola, ConAgra Kraft and P&G I’ve shifted my focus a bit to leverage my experience where its needed most, and where I can have the most impact. So today I am focused on:

Fran Linnane

CEO/OWNER

of The Research Experts

My goal isn’t to be a large volume oriented research collection factory. Instead, I’m focused on quality of impact and helping you drive your company’s performance. I plan to work with a handful of companies that need an expert marketing research insights generalist who can assess their information needs quickly, build a comprehensive research/analytics plan and roadmap and help them execute all of their secondary and primary research project needs.

Given my extensive network in this industry I can activate hundreds of other subject matter experts in a wide range of disciplines and scale up quickly to meet the demands of any project.

  1. Companies in transition that need help getting in front of the market. This could include advertising strategy research, customer/consumer journey research, brand positioning work, new product/services, revenue management pricing research and/or optimizing targeting and media spending.

  2. Startups or early stage ventures that need to optimize their “Go to Market” capabilities. This could include assessing the competitive environment, quantifying and modeling TAM and economics of the value chain, developing new products and services while helping them develop expertise in analytics and research

  3. Anyone who needs help and doesn’t know where to begin.

How and where I spent the last 35+ years:

Head of Marketing and Competitive Intelligence

RentPath is a digital marketing services company focused on the rental real estate industry. I built a full-service in-house research team that was responsible for managing ~50 primary research studies a year. We saved $3Mil per year vs prior outsourcing strategy. We designed, programmed and executed all the studies on platforms like Alchemer, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey and Usertesting.com. I was accountable for competitive tracking to assess risks, opportunities and to generate insights to leverage our positioning of our current products and services portfolio. This included reporting on Real Estate economic trends and financial performance of ~10 competitors in the industry. Quantifying TAM (Total Addressable Market), financial and economic trends to inform the business and M&A strategy. Additionally, I led a range of projects to support marketing, product, B2B, customer experience, data science, SEM, and SEO teams

AVP Market and Competitive Intelligence

Discovered and monetized previously untapped network data that gave AT&T (Cingular) a competitive advantage for the 1st time in its history. Analyzed consumer insights data through consumer mapping to identify “emotional retention triggers” and combined this with network data to identify and substantiate 2 major claims for AT&T; “fewest dropped calls” and “fastest 3G network”. This positioning work was transformational. Leading to a reversal in churn, and revenue:

“Fewest Dropped Calls”- drove billions of dollars in market value” and thousands of switches per month over a 3 year period

“AT&T has the fastest 3G network” - Sales increased + 5%

As AT&T’s technical leader, I successfully defended AT&T’s reputatio in legal disputes vs. Verizon, T-Mobile and class action lawsuits saving the company millions of dollars in potential lawsuits

Created a Media Mix Modeling vision, strategy and organization that was used to plan $3BN in annual media spending. The econometric modeling capability and team centralized and integrated 26+ databases and models that measured demand elasticity and ROI of our spending.

Worldwide Director of Market Research

Led market research/insights function through critical stage of digital transformation. Team consisted of 50 professionals in 10 countries.

Led worldwide Strategic Forecasting team which identified savings of $600MM. Project reported directly to the CEO. The CFO declared; “…this work represents the turning point in our strategy and enabled us to deliver this year’s results”.

Leveraged market and consumer data to develop concept for new product “Liquid Gold” an innovative inkjet business model (patent #20050029157).

As head of US&C researchI created a global photography business forecasting model to better understand how emerging digital technologies/products would impact the consumer marketplace and to quantify the revenue transition from traditional to digital for 12 intrgrated product segments and 12 countries. The model created a wholistic view of shifting demand across the inducsry and was used to allocate billions of dollars in capital and annual spending by product line and region.


Co-led new product innovation team. Work generated 25+ ideas, 6 were approved and 2 were launched; generated $200MM incremental revenue in 3 years

Worldwide Group Manager of Market Research

Reported to the VP, Marketing Strategy. Led market research/insights team focused on channel, customer and consumer activation across all Coca Cola brands. Team consisted of 8 professionals.

Part of SWAT team focused on urgent turnarounds opportunities, conducting projects in 14 countries across the globe. Developed “fast track” commercialization process to reduce time to market from 18 months to <6 months

Revenue Management - “The prisoner dilemma”. Conducted discrete choice research on 50+ retail pricing strategies. Research was used to “sell in” a +10% price increase to bottlers and retailers

Consumer Packaged Goods Industry

10+ years learning how to assess business needs, identify the right issues, develop research plans, executing, analyzing and summarizing data into insights that drive the highest impact. Working with some of the best companies and people in their industries