Staff Profiles

Robert A. Ladner, Ph.D.
President

Since 1975, Dr. Robert Ladner has been designing research protocols and communications strategies to test reactions to advertising, new product concepts, market share shifts, interpersonal conflicts in companies, and communication of evidence presented at trials.

His industry expertise includes banking and finance, transportation planning and engineering, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, energy and utilities, health care, telecommunications, and organizational development. Over the 25+ years of BSR's existence, Dr. Ladner has conducted quantitative and qualitative research projects for a wide range of client organizations, from large corporations and municipalities to small start-up business and non-profit organizations.

Research Innovations

• Examined the impact of American propaganda radio and television on the attitudes of persons in the Republic of Cuba and ways to optimize the communications. Based on this research, recommendations were made to change the mix of broadcasting vehicles and program design to offset jamming technologies used by the Castro regime.
• Created PercepTrac^TM, one of the first dynamic "perception analysis" systems in wide use as a marketing research tool, in Spanish and German as well as English. In 1995, BSR modified the PercepTrac technology to analyze newspaper scanning behavior, reworking newspaper editorial content for several newspapers throughout the United States and in Latin America.
• Developed a method for measuring the gap between reported consumer intent and actual consumer behavior, allowing more effective prediction of consumer response to new product introductions in the financial and insurance industries.
• Designed a customer satisfaction trade-off model that was applied by the first American company to win the international Deming Award for quality improvement, and creating a workable trade-off model to balance the costs of quality improvement activities with corporate profits.

Education

Dr. Ladner earned degrees from Gettysburg College (BA, 1967), University of Kentucky (MA, Sociology, 1969) and Indiana University (PhD, Sociology and Social Psychology, 1972). Before founding BSR, he was Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Miami School of Medicine.