Here’s a chart that will dazzle the research and design teams you are working for. It’s called a Sankey chart. In the context of market research, it is used to show the “flow” of respondents from one cut of data into another. For example, suppose you have data on how respondents started shopping online for…
An article in The New Yorker claimed that a hundred years ago most Americans died in their mid-fifties. Alas, they were fooled by a statistic and the claim is not true.
Ever wonder what you get if you hire a fancy schmancy consulting firm for your survey research and marketing insights, instead of Versta Research? Every once in a while we have a potential client who insists: “Give us IBM! Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” I got a view into what those surveys look…
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,…
Believe it or not, some people do not find puppies irresistibly adorable, as our newest honorary member of the Versta Research team (pictured here) can tell you. Elio arrived a couple of weeks ago. He is 13 weeks old and truly over-the-top adorable. He mostly sleeps in a crate next to me as I work…
It all depends on what counts as a “question,” and also on how complex those questions are. A grid question with multiple rows takes a longer to answer than a simple yes-or-no question. A question that allows you to select multiple items from a laundry list of options takes longer than a standard 4-point scale.…
One thing that impressed me about my recent trip to Disney World (for Versta Research’s presentation on infographics at LIMRA’s annual market research conference) was this: It felt nice not to be badgered at every “touch point” for survey feedback about how they were doing. Indeed, Disney World is known for taking customer experience to…
Here is a brilliant thought experiment about big data, published as a one-paragraph short story in 1946 by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges: “. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the…
We have just published the Versta Research Fall 2015 Newsletter, offering an interactive puzzle to test your analytical skills as a research brain. It is based on a fascinating study published half a century ago in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. When I first encountered the puzzle it stuck in my mind for quite…
Venn diagrams are useful conceptual tools, which is why business people love them, and why programs like Word and PowerPoint incorporate them into their suite of “smart art” tools. But as useful as they are conceptually, Venn diagrams are also maddeningly tricky and problematic for data visualization. One reason is that accurate Venn diagrams are…