We recently received and reviewed an excellent book summarizing practical findings from academic marketing research. It is called Consumer Insights: Findings from Behavioral Research. It is published by the Marketing Science Institute and we highly recommend it. Why is it so good and useful for corporate researchers and marketers? It provides a quick overview of…
In Versta Research’s Winter 2011 Newsletter, published just this week, we describe a simple method for estimating how long it will take respondents to complete surveys. Here we offer the “Versta Digest” version as a handy reference card. Once you get the hang of it, you don’t need the examples and explanation. You just need…
Over the last few years we have wondered whether spreadsheet software like Excel will soon make statistics software like SPSS or SAS obsolete. Spreadsheets have amazingly powerful and often intuitive capabilities. They have many of the statistical functions we use every day. Younger people entering our profession rarely know programs like SPSS or SAS, and…
Versta Research is a strong advocate for using online panels for surveys. As telephone usage and technology have changed, phone surveys are increasingly difficult and expensive, and they are not necessarily more rigorous than other methods. But that doesn’t mean “anything goes” when it comes to fielding market research surveys and public opinion polls through…
Friends often solicit from me quick advice about conducting do-it-yourself customer satisfaction surveys. What questions should they ask? How many questions should they ask? What measures and scales should they use? And, of course, shouldn’t they be using NPS (Net Promoter Score) like everyone else? I tell them that, by far, the most useful question…
One powerful way to gain visibility and credibility in your marketplace is by sponsoring survey research that documents problems and solutions in areas where you have expertise. To be successful, it requires (1) rigorous research carefully designed to uncover the right topics, and (2) savvy PR work that uses data to tell a credible and…
MaxDiff is a powerful method and it is increasingly popular among market researchers. But it is not always the best choice for measuring the importance of attributes, and here’s why. Suppose you want to measure the importance of 12 attributes for a new product or service. If you know ahead of time that consumers are…
Having migrated from the world of academia to market research ten years ago, I appreciate the patience and care with which my academic colleagues pursue basic research without knowing for sure how (or whether) it will be used in the real world. But I can tell them this: It does get used, so keep doing…
Earlier this month Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr. died. He left behind a giant and reputable market research company and a brand name recognized throughout the world. The A.C. Nielsen company was started by his father and in its early years tracked the sales of goods through grocery and drug stores. The company then moved into…
Many of us have uneasy feelings when reading statistics that presumably apply to ourselves and our own lives. Often the statistics do not seem to “fit” and seem to misrepresent the lives of real people from which the statistics are derived. It is with good reason that we chuckle when someone tells us that the…