Jan Carlson formed Polaris Marketing Research, Inc. in 1989 as a full-service marketing research company. Through reinvestment and a passion for using technology to create new information collection and reporting offerings for clients, as well as improve productivity and quality, Carlson established a fully-automated, predictive dialer-based 32 station CATI interviewing center in 1992, years before all but the largest research companies made the jump. This led to accelerated company growth that helped fund other technological advances such as the introduction of auto-routing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) data collection in 1997, complex script Internet survey data collection in 1998 and interactive internet data reporting (StatTrac) in 2002. Carlson is committed to ensuring that Polaris stays on the leading edge of helpful technology that can improve the company’s abilities to fulfill our clients’ needs for quick, reliable and useful primary research information.

Previous to founding Polaris, Carlson spent ten years at BellSouth Corp., the last five of which he held marketing research, marketing strategy and customer satisfaction consulting positions for the newly created unregulated subsidiaries. Carlson completed graduate work while working in the retail industry, primarily developing advertising and promotional strategies for Carter-Overton Corp. and Food Fair, Inc. In addition to an extensive background in telecommunications and customer satisfaction research, Carlson has research experience in business-to-business services and the hospitality, health care and retailing industries.

Carlson specializes in quantitative research. He has designed and managed all phases of hundreds of web, telephone, IVR, mail and hybrid combination surveys. He has a full command of most multivariate techniques used in needs assessment and customer satisfaction research today, including multiple regression, factor, discriminant, conjoint and correspondence analysis and perceptual mapping. Carlson has a bachelor’s from the University of Arizona and a master’s of business administration in marketing from Georgia State University. He has co-authored a college-level textbook on marketing in the face of controversy — Marketing and Society (Prentice Hall, 1980)ces.