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Kempton Research Opens Focus Group Facility and Service in Sarasota

Focus Sarasota offers big-city market research service to Southwest Florida businesses

SARASOTA, Fla. (November 14, 2011) Savvy business owners and marketing managers know that making decisions without understanding customer opinions and desires often leads to costly mistakes. Focus groups are an important tool businesses use to dig into such critical information. Now, a Sarasota market research professional has launched Focus Sarasota (www.FocusSarasota.com), a full-service focus group facility and service — the only one of its kind in Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties.

“Southwest Florida’s business community has matured to a point when it needs its own local facility to interview consumers who live in our market area,” says Stephanie Kempton, Focus Sarasota founder and owner of Kempton Research and Planning. “At Focus Sarasota, we design and implement focus groups for all types of for-profit and nonprofit organizations and we provide our facility to business decision-makers and advertising agencies who want to administer their own groups.”

Focus groups help businesses understand what customers want, identify obstacles to buying a product or changing a behavior, and test pricing options, among many other uses. Kempton also has identified Sarasota County’s senior demographic as a “market research living laboratory” for business decision-makers who want to learn more about this group of consumers, which has massive buying power worldwide.

Located in downtown Sarasota at 1990 Main Street, Suite 750, Focus Sarasota is not a traditional focus group facility with a one-way mirror. Spacious rooms with comfortable furnishings also contain the latest technology for streaming a group by video right to the client’s desktop anywhere in the world. The facility is located in a Class-A office building and offers two rooms that seat 10-14 participants. The building also provides on-site, covered parking.

As a member of the Marketing Research Association, Focus Sarasota has a relationship with most focus group facilities internationally, allowing Kempton to assist with multi-city projects.

“The key to offering this type of big-city service in a smaller community is to offer flexible pricing based on just the service the client needs,” Kempton said. “If you only need the location, want help with recruiting participants, or need the whole project delivered from start to finish, Focus Sarasota can make it happen.”

Focus Sarasota is being launched by Kempton Research and Planning, a full-service, custom research firm which specializes in quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Founded in Sarasota in 2007, by Stephanie Kempton, the company provides insight through research and planning to help managers make better business decisions.

Kempton has more than 20 years of experience in marketing and communications across a wide range of industries: banking, real estate, manufacturing, utilities, retail, healthcare, arts, non-profit, sports and entertainment. Kempton was selected by the state’s GrowFL Economic Gardening program to provide market research consultation to GrowFL client companies. GrowFL provides a suite of high-end, high-speed technical assistance and business resources to qualified companies that need access to information and decision-making tools, typically only available to larger companies.

Kempton has a Bachelor of Science in Advertising and Master of Business Administration from the University of Florida and has obtained a Professional Researcher Certification at the expert level from the Marketing Research Association.

For more information about Focus Sarasota, visit the website at www.FocusSarasota.com, or call 941.365.0033. # # #

Contact: Heidi Smith, Heidi Smith Communications Inc. [email protected] 941.504.2803