A few years back, some researchers were predicting that social media would cause a seismic shift in how we conduct brand research, customer satisfaction tracking, innovation research, and so on. Others were not so sure, arguing that the fundamentals of data collection and analysis will always be the same. Both sides were represented on a…
If you have ever been called to participate in a phone survey, you probably know the routine where you hear a question and then jump in with an answer. A good interviewer will remind you that she needs to read the entire question and all the answer options just to be sure that you offered…
I rarely miss the world of academia after having jumped ship twelve years ago, but one thing I always appreciated was that teaching involved distilling ideas down to their simplest and most essential form. Students often led the way for me, asking questions that forced me to clarify, deepen, and condense. So it was again…
It’s our job to deliver bad news as well as good news, right? To tell clients what they’re doing wrong so they can fix their problems and leap to the next level of profitability, right? Why would they spend money collecting data if they just wanted to hear how much customers love them? In fact,…
It is hard to find an appropriate use for Google Surveys, because, as we outlined in a review article last fall, its capabilities are limited. But last week we needed a quick incidence test of how many U.S. adults own a certain type of investment product. Google Surveys seemed perfect. It was not fast, by…
We’re all for ditching research when you have strong intuitions about your business and have no pressing questions that need to be answered. But too many business leaders are now following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs who was notorious for believing that consumers can’t tell you what they want. Aggressively ignoring market research has…
If you have ever done “clicker training” with a dog, you know how amazingly effective positive rewards are in training, versus the old-fashioned method of “correction” and negative feedback. Identify and reward the behavior you want, and you can teach an old dog new tricks within hours. It works for people too, which is why…
Some business managers and marketing executives mistakenly believe that “big data” will deliver better insight because of the sheer volume of data now at our disposal. Now we just need the statisticians, the computing power, and the analytics software to sift through it all, right? Not so. The truth is, for most purposes you don’t…
Or better yet, we might say “Why GOOD Research Takes So Long.” Our answer (before you feel inspired by the video embedded below) is that good research is creative and thoughtful and takes a great deal of intellectual energy at several crucial points: It puzzles over multiple ways (including data sources and methods) to get…
This week we published Versta Research’s quarterly newsletter with a feature article entitled “How to Design an Excellent Chart.” It addresses one critical piece of turning research data into compelling stories by focusing on the process of data visualization. For us, that process involves five steps: