Company Background
Loma Buena was founded as Lynd Bacon & Associates in 1991. Our knowledge leadership team has well over a century of collective, practical experience in addressing important marketing and management questions, and in providing direction on strategy and tactics.
We apply our extensive backgrounds and training in business, analytics, and data management in a broad range of industries that include technology, telecommunications, health care, pharmaceuticals, transportation, travel & leisure, financial services, consumer packaged goods, fashion, eCommerce, on line services and communities, bricks-and-mortal retail, home improvement, sports, education, nonprofit, industrial goods and services, agriculture, and veterinary products and services.
Loma Buena is a corporate entity, but functionally it is a collaborative of geographically dispersed senior-level business people who pool their talents on an as needed basis, much like the teams assembled to produce movies. This organization makes it possible for us to customize the skills mix we use in each project, while at the same time minimizing overhead. As a result, we provide very high value, not just high quality results.
Leadership
Lynd D. Bacon, President. (lbacon (at) lba (dot) com) Lynd is best described as an applied behavioral scientist and technology entrepreneur. His areas of expertise include marketing, new product development, research methodology, statistics, machine intelligence, and decision support methods. He was the founder of Sighthound Solutions, Inc., a software company providing innovation support tools that was combined with LBA in 2006, and Information Arts, Inc., a software company that provided tools for the quantitative analysis of text as data. He has held senior executive positions with NFO WorldGroup(now TNS: Taylor-Nelson-Sofres), Knowledge Networks Inc., Vividence Corp.( subsequently acquired by Keynote Systems), and YouGov America Inc. with responsibilities in product and systems development, advanced analytics, and applied science. He has taught at The University of Chicago, The University of Illinois at Chicago, and Rush University. While at The University of Chicago he was the Associate Director of the Center for Research in Marketing. He was previously the Vice President of the American Marketing Association's Marketing Research Council, and is an active member in several professional organizations. Lynd has a Ph.D. in Cognitive (Experimental) Psychology and also an M.A. in Physiological Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His M.B.A. is from the Graduate School of Business at The University of Chicago, and is in marketing, econometrics, and health care. He completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at Rush-Presbyterian-St.Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, and has been licensed as a psychologist. While at Rush he was a member of the medical house staff, and on the faculty of Rush University Medical School. Lynd is certified in new product development process management by the Product Development and Management Association. He is Co-Editor in Chief of the Wiley Review Series on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and regularly reviews articles for the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Research Magazine, and the journal Nonlinear Dynamics in Psychology and the Life Sciences.
Peter Lenk, Senior Advisor and senior member of the LBA Advisory Board. (plenk (at) lba (dot) com) Peter Lenk is an associate professor of Operations Management and Marketing at the Stephen M. Ross Business School at the University of Michigan. His primary area of research is Bayesian inference and its applications. Peter's research includes semiparametric density and regression estimation and applications of Bayesian inference to marketing, finance, and information science. He received his Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of Michigan under the able and demanding guidance of Bruce Hill. His dissertation received the Savage Award in 1985. He was a faculty member of the Statistics and Operations Research Department at the Stern School of Business, New York University from 1984 to 1989, at which time he joined the University of Michigan Business School.
Ashwin Sridhar, Advisory Board Member and Consultant.
(asridhar (at) lba (dot) com) Ashwin is the founder of ZLINQ solutions, a provider of systems for doing surveys over the Internet. He has over 13 years experience in technical leadership, system architecture and software development. His previous roles include having been Vice President and Chief Architect of Sighthound Solutions. Prior to joining Sighthound Solutions, he co-founded a software development company and was instrumental in leading development and bringing to market an on-demand solution for online feedback collection and management. He also provided technical leadership to projects for several companies including Sun Microsystems and nVIDIA Corporation. While at Sabre, Inc. in the 90’s, he developed e-Commerce and decision support systems for the airline industry. During this time, he successfully delivered these solutions to several major airlines including American Airlines, US Airways, Lufthansa, Air France and Swiss. Ashwin holds a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Clemson University.
Lawrence Fisher, Senior Consultant. (lfisher (at) lba (dot) com) A senior-level research industry veteran, Larry has worked for 25 years in executive capacities for four of the largest global research companies (IRI, TNS, Research International and Synovate) managing both syndicated and custom projects and high-end analytical services for multi-national clients. Since 2000 Larry has focused on the improving the reliability and compatibility of online data collection with other standard collection techniques and has contributed significant white papers and articles supporting the appropriate use of this source. Larry is a highly active and visible professional, serving on the Board of Governors of the Interactive Market Research Organization, on the editorial board of the Journal of Online Research, on the External Advisory Board of the A.C. Nielsen Center (since 1991), on the AMA judging committee for the annual EXPLOR award in online research, and heads up the online track for MRA meetings. Larry received his BA in Social Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his masters and doctorate in cultural anthropology from Northwestern University. He has additional postdoctoral training in linguistics from the University of Chicago and in business from the Wharton School. His academic appointments include faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, and the University of Michigan. Larry recently joined the faculty of the graduate program in Integrated Marketing Communications at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
C. Michael Troutman, Senior Consultant.
(mtroutman (at) lba (dot) com) Mike has a broad background in strategic marketing research spanning 30 years of experience. His areas of expertise include advanced analytics in areas such as marketing mix models, new product forecasting, customer satisfaction/loyalty management, sales analysis modeling and brand equity measurement. He previously served as Director – Business Research Technology at Eastman Kodak, where he led a team of internal consultants for Kodak’s worldwide marketing research staff on new research methods and advanced analytics. He was Director-Business Research for Colgate Palmolive Hill’s Pet Nutrition division, and was instrumental in helping Colgate develop the Science Diet pet food brand. Mike has had other executive/management positions in General Electric’s Corporate Marketing group. He was a co-founder of Charles, Charles & Associates, a technical marketing consulting business that served firms in telecommunications and pharmaceutical/animal health care industries. Throughout his career, he has been involved in promoting the profession of marketing research. He is a member of the American Marketing Association and is a past board member of the Rochester AMA. He is a Past Chair of the Advisory Board of the Nielsen Marketing Research Center at the University of Wisconsin. He has taught at Clemson University and is currently an adjunct professor in the Center for Quality and Applied Statistics at Rochester Institute of Technology. He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. from Kansas State University in Experimental and Cognitive Psychology.
