If you have trouble getting people to fill out your surveys, you ought to be paying them. There is nothing wrong with it. It does not mess up your data with phony information that people were paid to provide. On the contrary, paying an appropriate incentive helps signal the importance of your survey such that…
Here’s a sobering question for professionals who work in the “insights” industry: How much of your market research really offers insight? Not just validating data, or routine measurements, or pro forma tracking. Not just percentages of “how many said what” in a customized study. By true insight we mean: a direct answer to a deeply…
A surprising trend among our academic colleagues in marketing, psychology, and the social and behavioral sciences, is that they are crowdsourcing respondents for research studies from Mechanical Turk (MTurk). I am still overcoming my own resistance to the idea, as it rubs against Versta Research’s obsessive focus on data quality. Online sampling absolutely can and…
The last presidential election was a stunning win for online polls and a drubbing defeat for telephone polls. It provoked a loud and contentious debate among survey methodologists about the accuracy of polls and about how (and whether) to revise our methods. So here we are again, four years later with technology having moved faster…
Even just a few years ago the idea of using SMS text messaging for surveys seemed absurd. There were strong demographic skews to cell phone usage, and among SMS usage as well. Texting was often a cost add-on for cell phone users, so they carefully guarded it. And of course research companies could barely manage…
There is an important directional bias in our culture such that things above tend to be perceived as better than things below. Top is better than bottom. Up is better than down. Over is better than under. Whatever the reasons for this bias (and there are several compelling theories) recent research shows that it affects…
That Nespresso survey I got via my work email—surely it must be SPAM, right? I have no relationship with the company and have never inquired about it. Some sleazy market research company harvested a huge list of e-mails and blasted it out to hundreds of thousands of people like me. So I decided to report…
We read the most irritating claim about focus groups several weeks back, which inspired us to begin writing about why it was so wrong. But we realized somebody else could do it better than we could—a true expert on focus groups who built a thriving research business by conducting focus groups (among other qualitative methods)…
Most companies test new product or service ideas with concept tests to evaluate market interest and to refine their ideas. Most of these (like most surveys, nowadays) are conducted online, which offers speed and cost efficiency. But there is a downside. While people are quite adept at reviewing ideas and answering questions in online formats,…
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…