Every year I review and suggest summer classes that researchers might consider to learn all the newest techniques for research design and analysis. But for researchers who work in corporate settings, many of those classes are not practical. Who has the luxury of hanging out in Ann Arbor for six weeks to brush up on…
For every dozen people who hate using PowerPoint, there is a weird person who loves it. That weird person is me. PowerPoint has surprisingly strong capabilities for charts and for displaying research data. All it takes to create beautiful and powerful research reports in PowerPoint is: (1) getting familiar with its functionality, a lot of…
While it is tempting to use advanced programming to “force” good answers and good behavior out of survey respondents, don’t do it. Let respondents make mistakes. Let them mess up, and then review who messes up. This is one of the best ways to assess data quality in a survey, and trust me you will…
Survey response rates, which are still a measure of data quality and survey success in our industry, continue to drop. Most online surveys of customers (one’s own customers) will garner response rates of two to three percent—and that is if you are lucky and if you do everything right. Rigorously executed phone surveys achieve miserably…
Even the very best survey shops are pressured to do bad work. My recent experience with one bad survey from a fancy survey shop illustrates in multiple ways one of the biggest problems facing market research today: bad surveys via robots, including the newest dreaded incarnation of robots: Artificial Intelligence. The survey came from a…
A few years ago there emerged, at last, a calm consensus among social and market researchers about defining our current generations. Now when we talk about Boomers, we all know that the last year a Boomer was born was in 1964. And the oldest Millennials are now 38 years old. The problem is that if…
Besides market research, another job I have (as a labor of love) is working for Henry, an organic farmer. He knows a lot more about “marketing” and “marketing research” than a lot of egg-head researchers I know. So if you want to understand consumer barriers when it comes to buying healthy, delicious, and sustainable food,…
Putting together our winter newsletter, Five Free Data Sources Every Market Researcher Should Know, had me reviewing various sources of free data that we use nearly every day at Versta Research. The really big sources were top-of-mind and easy to come up with: data from The Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Institutes…
If you make your survey questions hard, it turns out that people will make a good faith effort to answer them. But they will make mistakes, and you will end up with bad data that lacks reliability and validity. What I find so interesting is that most people will actually try to answer your hard…
Here is a sly little test I recommend giving the next researcher who offers up their help on your next quantitative survey. Ask if they have ever used a DIY survey tool, and what advice they would give you about sample size based on this selection tool you looked at from one of the largest…