This summer you will not have to schlep to Ann Arbor for a month if you want to take advantage of top-notch summer training courses in survey research offered at the University of Michigan. Everything is being offered online this year! It is a perfect opportunity for corporate researchers and others who work on the…
A public relations client early in my career gave this assessment of my work: “Joe is strong at highlighting problems, but what I really care about is solutions.” That was many years ago, after I left university teaching and started doing client work full time. Her words have stayed with me and deeply shaped the…
This data we saw last week reflects the type of data that PR professionals absolutely dream about and hope for when they conduct surveys. It shows hugely dramatic differences among the 50 U.S. states. The media relations people were able to pitch local outlets in each state with a story about how their area and…
Contrary to some widely held beliefs that mobile devices are a barrier to survey participation, a majority of survey respondents nowadays fill them out on phones, rather than on desktops, laptops, or tablets. Research has amply documented that the quality and reliability of data collected via mobile devices is comparable to data collected on desktops.…
It is possible now to get thousands of responses to a survey overnight so that you can turn around research results as quickly as your managers and clients want. Would you trust the findings? I hope not. Suppose you want a general population survey that truly represents all U.S. adults. You will need to ensure…
Oddly enough, there are market research consultants who are unaware that they (and you, and anybody in the world) can have direct access to census data files for analysis. We just wrote a newsletter about the value of census data, and about the amazing rigor that goes into validating questions like those on race &…
If demographic benchmarks and trends are essential to your business and the research you conduct (things like age, gender, race, ethnicity, and region) then our just-published 2020 Spring Newsletter has information you absolutely need to know. The U.S. Census Bureau continues to change how it collects and classifies demographic data. Right now the Bureau is…
Market research has made it all the way to the top! It has a seat at the c-suite table just as marketing and research champions have hoped for all these years. According to a recent analysis by The Wall Street Journal, a large number of CEOs now track their company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) obsessively,…
If you crave a deep understanding of why your customers choose one product, concept, or message over another, you might be thinking that deep-dive qualitative research is best. Possibly it is, but you should also be considering a research method at the opposite end of the spectrum: conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is one of the…
If you read our article a few weeks ago about COVID-19, there were probably several statistics we cited that you (or maybe a colleague) misinterpreted. That’s because instead of reporting the percentage of respondents who did or said something, we reported the mean of all survey respondents’ answers to a numeric scale. We had no…