Jan Carlson

President

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.  During the time of AT&T’s divestiture, when Southern Bell combined with South Central Bell to create the new BellSouth Corporation, Carlson served on the task force to establish the central organization for providing IT and supply services for the 160,000+ employees in the combined organization. After divestiture, he established the marketing research function at the fledgling BellSouth Advertising & Publishing Corporation.  His experience at BellSouth included management of all types of telecommunication and advertising research projects including consumer and business customer satisfaction tracking surveys, lost customer studies, new product testing, brand image, awareness and tracking research, employee job satisfaction research, consumer and business customer “needs gap” analysis, employee skills gap analysis, advertising concept testing and awareness research, YP directory redesign studies (human factors research to concept testing), price/demand elasticity studies and community involvement and public image research.

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).

Debra S. Semans

Senior Vice President

Debra S. Semans, a veteran marketing researcher and nationally recognized expert on brand positioning and strategy, is Polaris’ senior vice president.

She has overall responsibility for Polaris’ client relationships and project satisfaction. Semans also has responsibility for Polaris’ marketing efforts, as well as building strategic alliances for project support services.

Prior to joining Polaris, Semans worked as an independent marketing consultant for five years. Previous to that, she was vice president of The Brand Consultancy in Norcross, Ga., Vice President for Market Development/Expense Management for Carlson Wagonlit Travel in Minneapolis, MN., and the Vice President for Strategic and New Business Development and Vice President for New Market Development and Research at Holiday Inn Worldwide (now Intercontinental Hotels Group) in Atlanta.

She also worked several years at BellSouth Corp. in Atlanta, ending as Director of Marketing Research and Planning at IntelliVentures with BellSouth Enterprises.

Semans is a former member of the International Board of Directors for the American Marketing Association, former member of the AMA Services Marketing Council, former Atlanta AMA Chapter Officer and Board Member and former Washington, D.C., AMA Chapter Officer.

She is former President of the Board of Directors Network, a former member of the Marketing Advisory Council for the U.S. Census Bureau and former board member for the Georgia Executive Women’s Network.

Semans has been an instructor in marketing management, internal branding and non-profit marketing for the American Marketing Association and the Georgia Center for Non Profits, and has been a featured speaker at the CityCares Leadership Conference, the Ohio Parks and Recreation Association Conference, International Association of Business Communicators’ conferences in Dallas and Atlanta conferences and various conferences for the International Quality and Productivity Center.

She has published articles in Financial Services Marketing, Marketing Management, Marketing News and on www.marketingpower.com.

Semans holds a master’s of business administration from Georgia State University and a bachelor’s degree from State University of New York in Oswego, N.Y.