Six months ago Google launched an intriguing new way to conduct cost-effective surveys that offers an alternative to omnibus surveys. One or two easy survey questions are presented to online users as they seek access to high quality media sites. They gain free access in exchange for answering the survey questions. Google tracks how many…
A mistake often made by both professional and do-it-yourself researchers is letting a survey sit in the field without actively monitoring it. Once we design a survey and put it out there for people to respond, we just wait patiently (or get busy on another project) until we have data for analysis, right? But collecting…
If you ever feel like strangling the next research consultant who promises to deliver “actionable insights” then you can join me and the Dilbert team in making fun of it instead. Not only is it a horrid phrase, but it is unfortunately meaningless now that every research firm claims to be different from others by…
Fifteen years ago the U.S. Census Bureau removed “Hispanic” from its question about race and instead created a stand-alone question to assess Hispanic ethnicity. It’s the reason we often advise our clients to ask about race and ethnicity separately, using questions similar to the Census Bureau’s, which are shown in Figure 1. Well, chances are…
During a presidential election year there is no escaping the flurry of public opinion polling and the intense scrutiny that surveys get from the media. But love it or hate it, there are excellent reasons to pay close attention to this year’s political polling.
We love this cartoon because it raises such interesting issues about probability and prediction in market research. Here’s a quiz. Suppose you own a retail store and want us to help predict which customers that come through the door will buy. You want to focus your sales efforts on the best prospects. We do our…
The first lesson I learned in one of my graduate-level research methods class was surprising and simple: You need variation in your data if you want to do statistical analysis. In other words, you cannot identify the causes, predictors, or so-called “drivers” of an outcome unless you have a whole variety of different outcomes in…
If you ever have trouble convincing your managers and executives about the value of market research, tell them this: The one billion dollar settlement that Samsung will pay Apple for patent infringement was based on a carefully designed market research study using conjoint analysis. According to colleagues at Sawtooth Software, a company that develops the…
Way back in 1944, Edwards Deming published an article in the American Sociological Review that could be required reading for anybody who does research today. He outlined all potential (and unfortunately, common) sources of error in survey research. Apparently our contemporary obsession with sample sizes, random samples, response rates, and margins of error is not…
The New York Times Magazine runs a weekly feature called “Who Made That?” It provides a history on the origins of oddities like fly swatters, soy-sauce dispensers, clothespins, Kraft Singles, and … pie charts. They attribute it to one William Playfair, a Scottish engineer who created and published a pie chart in 1801. He is…