Research Collaborative | About Polly Staman, Principal

Founder and Principal of Research Collaborative, Polly brings a broad background in marketing, research and consulting to her many satisfied clients. Through keen insights and strong writing skills, Polly effectively translates research into meaningful and relevant corporate learning. She has worked extensively with clients concerned with product development, relationship management, branding, market segmentation and competitive benchmarking, among other areas.

Through her 15+ years in the business, Polly has developed a large network of outstanding research professionals to call upon as needed for specific projects – including focus group moderators, quantitative specialists, anthropologists/ethnographers and industry content specialists.

Polly earned her MBA from Suffolk University, where she was a Marketing Department research fellow and Adjunct Instructor of Marketing. She holds a BA in Counseling Psychology from Boston College.

Her other passions, besides listening and learning and running a business, include tending her garden, building with Legos with her son, and walking her dog. (She also plays a mean game of Scrabble.)

On listening…

"In business school, I learned the fundamental science of market research but it wasn’t until I became a parent that I really understood the significance of listening. If you have ever asked a 5-year-old ‘What did you do in school today?’ you know that ‘nothing’ is the inevitable reply. To get people to talk, you have to ask questions in different, much more creative and compelling ways."

On the qualities of success...

"Market research is a left brain/right brain profession. It takes an analytic, detail oriented mind to detect the issues, but it takes a creative mind to transform the data into visual and verbal stories. I have a mix of both and I think that helps to make me successful."