Parris Cisna

I am an 11 year director-level marketing professional with experience primarily in the health and beauty consumer goods sector. My specialties include content marketing, copywriting (SEM, website, email, social media, etc.) and integrated marketing communications.
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Stihl vs. Husqvarna: Which Is The Better Chainsaw?

If you survey 100 professional loggers and arborists on whether they prefer a Stihl or Husqvarna chainsaw, you are likely to get a clear-cut, 50/50 split. Both Stihl and Husqvarna brands produce chainsaw models for professional and home improvement use and are highly regarded by consumers. Based on an analysis of the pros and cons of each brand, Husqvarna is the best choice of chainsaw for long-term home use. Husqvarna chainsaws are fuel-efficient with larger gas tanks making them more conveni
Upgraded Home •

How To Walk On A Steep Roof (Step-by-Step Guide)

The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reports that over 500,000 people receive treatment for ladder-related injuries per year. 97% of these injuries occur at a private residence and around 300 of them are fatal. While the fatality rate in this statistic sits below 1%, the sheer volume of injuries that occur from inexperienced homeowners is alarming. You can safely walk on a steep roof to conduct repairs, replace tiles, or clean your gutters. However, it is imperative to use the right equi
Daily Dose •

How to Detangle Hair without Breakage

Whether your strands are severely knotted, teased seemingly beyond repair or naturally yet frustratingly intertwined in a deadly snare, detangling your tresses can be a major pain. Stress and anxiety aside, detangling your hair (if done improperly) can damage your strands and cause unnecessary breakage to an otherwise healthy head of hair. Should You Detangle Wet or Dry Hair? Countless reports claim conflicting information about whether you should detangle your hair while it is wet or while it
Daily Dose •

Detangler vs. Leave-In Conditioner: Is There a Difference?

When you think of “detangler,” you may think of sunkissed memories eating watermelon, cross-legged, on a poolside lounge chair while mom sprays a detangler aggressively on your strands; the spray bottle resembled a Narwhal mixed with an unfortunate-shaped fish while the aroma of alcohol-infused pears wafted up your nose… Oh, those glory days of summer. While those carefree years are long behind you, the concept of detangling lives on. Think: kids detangler with an “adult” twist, a pinch of scie
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How to Gather Customer Satisfaction Data Using Crowdsourcing

Measuring customer satisfaction with your goods, services and customer experience (CX) is exceptionally important to increase sales and gain market share. The happier your customer, the more likely they are to become permanent brand advocates, providing word-of-mouth referrals to their friends, family and social media networks, saving you on marketing spend in the long term. It is 7x more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to market to an existing customer making an investment in cu
Daily Dose •

5 Beginner-Friendly Hairstyles for The Work-From-Home Professional

Whether you’re a seasoned, work-from-home veteran or your remote contributions are temporary, the home office usually comes with a slightly altered motto of: "No Shoes, No Shirt… Oh Well!" Why would you style your hair (or even put on pants) when you work from home? Aside from the need to look moderately professional for the occasional Zoom video conference, Professor Carolyn Mair quotes a relevant study from the 1994 Clothing and Textile Research Journal in her book The Psychology of Fashion (
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Which is Better? Traditional vs. Crowdsourced Mystery Shopping

Every single business that currently operates in the free market wants to know exactly how their customers feel about their products or service and the entirety of their shopping experience. If a business did not care about their customer’s experience, it is likely to fail faster than you can say “big mistake.” You or one of your team members might have said at one point: “We need answers to concerns about our CX directly from our customers.” Look no further: mystery shopping allows your busine
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Why You Need to Monitor Planogram Compliance with Crowdsourcing

We discussed planograms and their importance in our blog Visual Merchandising: What Is A Planogram And Why Is Compliance Important? but as a refresh: a planogram is a visual representation of the proper placement of all displays, merchandise and shelving used as an in-store “guide.” Planograms are generally developed by the sales or marketing teams based on demographic insights, foot traffic and sell-through data. This retail management tool is extremely effective in increasing sales and boosti
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How to Measure Customer Satisfaction

It’s Friday night and you decide to visit a new restaurant recommended by a good friend. The staff was attentive, drinks were well-made and the house special left you with a delighted pallet and a content feeling in your stomach. You left the restaurant satisfied and plan to return in the coming weeks with a larger group of friends. The premise is simple: the customer is the nucleus of your business, without which your business would cease to exist. Customer satisfaction is the blood force of y
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Improve Your Customer Experience (CX) with OOS Monitoring

Whether you work in supply chain, marketing, sales, finance or customer service, a casual mention of the term “out-of-stock” can send shivers down your spine, erupting massive goose pimples on every limb. OOS is a terrifying, anxiety-inducing horror story. While it is difficult to nail down the true monetary loss of OOS, your business (and your distributors) may be losing thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in potential profit. Now, that’s just the business end of this all-
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How Monitoring OOS Helps Increase Sales

Picture this: it’s Sunday morning and the birds are chirping. You head into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee when halfway into the brew cycle your coffee maker breaks. What a ghastly situation! Off to Target you go to replace your Morning Toast* coffee maker. You get to the store and head to the “Kitchen Appliances” aisle only to find that the Morning Toast T300 model is nowhere to be found; the shelf talker sits peacefully on the shelf, but there is no inventory. You love your Morning Toast
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Gathering Competitive Intelligence Through Mystery Shopping

You now understand “Competitive Intelligence” or CI, a key market research terminology, after reading our article “What is Competitive Intelligence?” You also know the many benefits of incorporating and executing a CI strategy into your business planning after reading our article “The Benefits of Robust Competitive Intelligence.” Now you want to know how to collect sufficient, non-biased CI data quickly and efficiently, which is the logical next step. To reiterate: Competitive Intelligence (CI)
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The Benefits of Robust Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the sister of market research, sharing many of the same characteristics and techniques for information collection. CI, however, specifically targets competitive brands, market data and consumer response to said data. The result of effective analysis of competitive intelligence data is the anticipation of emerging trends, new technologies or potential market (macro-) or industry (micro-) movement in the near or distant future. In this rapidly moving, data-centric
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What is Competitive Intelligence?

The Twenty-First Century introduced unmatched innovation, built off the back of key internet players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, who created a whole new market for businesses to explore. Barriers to market entry are the lowest they have ever been, which creates incredible opportunity to pursue entrepreneurship; on the flip side, competition is hyper intense, with consumers exhausting products and services at the fastest rate in history… because they can with the bevy of endless options! S
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What is Crowdsourcing and Why Should You Care?

Crowdsourcing is a scalable process of solving problems by engaging a network of individual contributors (either digitally or physically) to complete a series of tasks or projects, solve an impending business problem, or gather, organize and analyze vast amounts of crucial business data for strategic implementation. While there is a bevy of crowdsourcing models in operation today, there are three, ultra-popular models commonly used to efficiently and cost-effectively generate data for both smal
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What Data Should Your Retail Execution Team Be Collecting?

The American CPG market is currently valued at $813B. Consumers face more options than ever, even with small scale, daily purchases; the overwhelming variety has contributed to a massive decrease in brand loyalty. Only 8% of global consumers self-identify as brand or product loyalists making “brand switching” an increasingly concerning consumer behavior. This behavior has led businesses to focus predominantly on the customer experience in-store to create differentiation. Retail audits help bran
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How to Define and Measure the Customer Experience

Experts at Convince and Convert define customer experience as the “combined interactions a customer has with your brand.” These interactions span the entire customer journey from individual consumer touchpoints to customer engagement channels (i.e. chatbots, social media, email, etc.). Customer experience is subjective, which makes achieving a unanimously positive customer experience nearly impossible. If you surveyed 12 individuals on the same customer journey, each individual’s interpretation
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Improve Your Customer Experience with Data

The Age of the Customer Years before it was widely accepted, Forrester Research, Inc., the notoriously famous market research firm, spotted the economic shift in power from a “business-centric model” to a “people-centric model” where consumers demand the innovation of goods and services. The team at Forrester called this era the “Age of the Customer;” they continue to believe that “digitally-savvy customers would change the rules of business, creating extraordinary opportunity for companies th
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Mystery Shopping 101

A mystery shopper is an anonymous consumer hired to provide an unbiased evaluation of your company’s operations through guided observation. There are four types of mystery shopping that allow businesses to analyze their customer journey for actionable insights: 1. In-Person Mystery Shopping. In-person mystery shopping requests that a single shopper visits a brick-and-mortar business location to assess the process of making a purchase. 2. Telephone Mystery Shopping. Telephone mystery shopping

Cherie's Skin Report: The Perfect Pandemic Skincare Resource

I really like the Cherie Skin Report tool and plan to chart my skincare journey in the app! The day is March 11th. I hobble into the hospital with my husband 20 minutes after my water broke while vigorously watching A Bronx Tale. 24.5 hours of labor and an emergency c-section later, I am blessed with my beautiful son... and the whole world shut down. I specifically had BIG plans for my skin after a seemingly never-ending pregnancy. My plan was to visit the dermatologist merely weeks after givin
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