Janet Larson is a Harvard MBA and market research expert with 20+ years experience helping clients gain insight into their most important business questions. With 9 years in marketing at American Express and 20+ years running her own market research and strategy practice, Ms. Larson has developed deep expertise as a front-line marketer and strategy consultant to Fortune 500’s, nonprofits and startups across a wide range of industry settings and challenges.
Clients include a diverse array of some of the world’s most respected brands, including The Nature Conservancy, RAND Corporation, Google, Chanel, World Wildlife Fund, Chase Bank, LA Opera, Johnson & Johnson, and Esquire Magazine, to name just a few.
Ms. Larson’s key strength is in bringing a strategic and pragmatic approach to research and marketing program development – what’s the “so what” of research findings and what can her client do differently starting tomorrow to apply findings and achieve their business goals?
To meet the unique needs of each client, Ms. Larson draws from an extensive set of analytical tools and techniques, many of them proprietary and developed over years of real world-testing and refinement. She has built research projects to serve a wide range of objectives, from new product development to in-depth customer portraits to high impact public leadership campaigns.
Ms. Larson is unique in taking personal responsibility for the ground-level interviews that many firms delegate to their junior ranks. With a firm belief that the view from the top must include the view from the bottom, she has personally interviewed thousands of consumers over the years – at their homes, in their closets, while they work – and she brings the rich aggregate of that knowledge to every project.
She also authors, personally, the quantitative surveys which typically follow, designing dozens of highly successful national studies to validate findings on a broader scale and provide management with the market-driven hard data it needs to inform key business decisions.
Ms. Larson has developed a major body of work around the aging population and how increased longevity will have a world-changing impact across all aspects of our economy and human life. The 76 million Baby Boomers who are currently entering their retirement years have been the central focus of numerous nationwide studies Ms. Larson has designed and translated for public media.
The daughter of a cultural anthropologist who spent her early years in Africa accompanying her father as he interviewed native peoples, Ms. Larson gained an appreciation early on for the complexity and importance of properly understanding human behavior, needs, and values.
Ms. Larson graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in English and holds her Master’s of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.
