A good friend and client likes to joke during every project: “Remember Joe, correlation does not imply causation.” Well, I thought she was joking. Surely everybody with a job in marketing research knows this? Apparently not. Even professors at fancy business schools seem to forget it, as evidenced by this snippet of an article a…
We just completed a very cool research project (a concept test) that perfectly demonstrates the power of MaxDiff and TURF analysis. These two techniques can help you make smarter product decisions than other types of concept tests. Here is an overview of what we did and why it was so powerful. We asked consumers to…
If you are a smart person and you only occasionally try your hand at writing a survey, here is something you may find yourself doing: adding an open box at the end of every question so that respondents can “write in” their own answer if the pre-listed answers do not fit them. Our clients do…
For people who love research, the most depressing thing is to produce a report that nobody cares about. It hits with a thud, or sits on a shelf. Nobody bothers to look, or to offer an encouraging word of thanks, much less acknowledge how fantastic it is. Hence the cliched claims of “actionable insights” from…
It seems that every time we write or speak about market research infographics, people pay attention. Leading up the Fall 2017 Corporate Researchers Conference, the Insights Association asked for a preview article of our presentation on infographics for its weekly newsletter. It ended up being at the top of the Association’s list of most-read articles…
This is still raw, so I’m working hard to be constructive and not mean. But seriously, how much more self-centered can a veterinarian company be, than to send me a survey the morning after my dog dies to ask, “How did we do?” Yes, this really happened. On Friday, Lancelot (pictured above, on the day…
Here is an excellent quote from the New York Times’ Ana Marie Cox in her farewell commentary after two years of conducting in-depth interviews with famous people for the weekly “Talk” column: Being a good interviewer takes skill, just not the skill most people assume: You don’t have to be able to ask or come…
The best innovation in qualitative methods over the last decade is not online focus groups or bulletin boards or MROCs (Market Research Online Communities). It’s the smartphone. Your customers can snap pictures, take videos, and document all their thoughts and behaviors as they go about their everyday lives, generating some of the richest qualitative data…
Suppose you could have a neural network machine-learned algorithm that is 91% accurate in predicting who will buy your product and who will not, just with a computer facial scan. Wow—91% sounds amazing! Don’t buy it, and don’t be a sucker for big numbers until you look more closely at the math behind those big…
Research firms like Versta (and research teams like yours?) tend to think of design, strategy, and analysis as the critical place where we add value. But guess what. Everybody thinks that, and one consequence is that fieldwork and data collection are becoming dangerously bad. Nobody is paying attention anymore. Fieldwork is on auto-pilot. We recommend…