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…
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…
The title for this post quotes one of today’s New York Times editorials. It perfectly captures something essential about our work that we need to trumpet as loudly as we evangelize the power and benefits of research. Data can’t do everything. In fact, the bigger the data, the less it can do relative to the…
This week we published Versta Research’s quarterly newsletter with a feature article entitled “Wisdom in an Age-Old Question.” While it might seem simple to ask a person’s age on a survey, it turns out that there are all sorts of ambiguities and documented sources of error in the various ways you might ask it. Fortunately,…
What IS a credibility interval, you ask? It is a term making its way into mainstream market research just as Bayesian statistics are making their way into market research. A credibility interval provides a range of values, calculated using Bayesian statistical techniques, within which a statistical estimate is likely to fall. It is analogous to…
By elephants, we mean Republicans. Or maybe you have too many Democrats. Maybe it keeps going back and forth, which is the problem that Gallup sometimes has. In the spirit of learning all we can from election season polling, this week we focus on whom to include (or exclude) in your research, analysis, and market…
We love this cartoon because it raises such interesting issues about probability and prediction in market research. Here’s a quiz. Suppose you own a retail store and want us to help predict which customers that come through the door will buy. You want to focus your sales efforts on the best prospects. We do our…
The first lesson I learned in one of my graduate-level research methods class was surprising and simple: You need variation in your data if you want to do statistical analysis. In other words, you cannot identify the causes, predictors, or so-called “drivers” of an outcome unless you have a whole variety of different outcomes in…
If you ever have trouble convincing your managers and executives about the value of market research, tell them this: The one billion dollar settlement that Samsung will pay Apple for patent infringement was based on a carefully designed market research study using conjoint analysis. According to colleagues at Sawtooth Software, a company that develops the…
Way back in 1944, Edwards Deming published an article in the American Sociological Review that could be required reading for anybody who does research today. He outlined all potential (and unfortunately, common) sources of error in survey research. Apparently our contemporary obsession with sample sizes, random samples, response rates, and margins of error is not…