Five years ago there were too many surveys, and today there are WAY too many surveys. They’ve taken over management functions and customer service departments. Have a complaint? Forget calling customer service (and good luck finding them). The best way get your complaint addressed is to give a low survey score, and, pronto, somebody contacts…
Earlier this year we trumpeted the idea of corporate research groups helping internal business partners do their own research. Sometimes is makes tons of sense, and sometimes not. So when it comes time for something more complicated, how do you educate a client about what matters and what doesn’t in terms of quality and rigor?…
Two things bugged me about the market research survey invitation I got from my alma mater. First, it was a mediocre three star survey that asked me a bunch of information they could easily have gotten from my LinkedIn profile. Second, it offered a chance to win a prize if I participated, and the effort…
One of the most common and useful units of geographic analysis for our business clients and other types of organizations is zip code. That’s because we typically have residential or business addresses for their customers and prospects, and also because zip codes demarcate relatively small areas, are easy to map, and are familiar to most…
The bowls of M&Ms, the soft drinks, the boxed sandwiches for the research team. The costs of a focus group really add up, don’t they? Well, suppose you brought in a troupe of improvisational comedians for the group. What would that cost? Um, how does $65,000 sound? That is a steep price for innovation, but…
Two of my usually-favorite sources for information and insight (AAPOR and the New York Times) came together this week with an embarrassing, face-scrunching example of convoluted statistical reporting: But Internet use correlates inversely with age and voting habits, making [online polling] a more severe problem in predicting elections. While all but 3 percent of those…
When people refuse to participate in your research surveys or say “no thanks” to your invitation to join a panel or focus group, it can hurt. Not just because it feels like a rejection of the awesome work you are doing, but also because it means you have to worry about the dreaded potential of…
There are plenty of good reasons to use Net Promoter Scores (NPS). They are based on sound measurement, are simple to use, are conceptually compelling, and are widely known by business executives outside of market research. But you know something is amiss when your bank starts asking how likely you are to recommend the online…
Market research almost always relies (or should rely) on U.S. Census data. The data are rigorous, reliable, and fundamentally important to every business, not-for-profit, and government body in the United States. So if you get a package that looks like this, as a neighbor did last week, here is what you should do: Open it…
Tomorrow we’re giving a talk at LIMRA’s annual Marketing and Research Conference in Baltimore. The topic? Creating spectacular infographics for market research. It builds upon our Newsletter article from last July, and upon our subsequent top-five article in Quirk’s. And thanks to our own Peter Kowalski, who has extraordinary talent designing infographics for research,…