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,…
I write a lot about how robots are messing up market research. But yesterday, I had the happy experience of a robot helping us in a surprising a way. It flagged an error in a list of competitive brands for an ATU study (Attitudes, Trial, and Usage)—an error that would invalidated our results if we…
I don’t know how big the Versta Research blog fan base is, but at the very least, the Quirk’s editors seem to follow us, and sometimes they ask for permission to reprint an article. Such was the case for an article we wrote last month about anonymity in research. The gist of that article was…
As we celebrate the 4th of July in the U.S. this year, please make it an occasion to reflect on some of the fundamental values and public goods of our country that make market research possible. There is so much infrastructure that has been built before us. Not just road and railways, but also public…
The best innovation in qualitative methods over the last decade is not online focus groups or bulletin boards or MROCs (Market Research Online Communities). It’s the smartphone. Your customers can snap pictures, take videos, and document all their thoughts and behaviors as they go about their everyday lives, generating some of the richest qualitative data…
If you design surveys that adapt well to mobile devices, you can feel proud. Current estimates are that only about half of all market research surveys are mobile-friendly. According to Research Now, an online panel that fields thousands of surveys from research vendors like Versta, just 15% are fully optimized for mobile use. But now…
It’s the week after Independence Day. You’re doing your best to re-focus on work after the holiday break. If only it could have lasted a few days longer! I can’t bring you a few more days vacation, but I can offer this suggestion for making the holiday last just a wee bit longer: Bring some…
Gender used to be one of the easiest questions to write for a survey. There was male and there was female, so we simply asked: “Which are you?” But our culture has begun acknowledging the fluidity of gender identity and gender assignment, and now, too, must survey research. Just this week we had a potential…
This familiar sentence opens the lead article of Public Opinion Quarterly’s 2017 special issue on survey research: “Telephone surveys are dead, claim some survey researchers, and should be replaced with nonprobability samples from Internet panels.” Hmm, I’ve said something similar to that in the past, I thought to myself. I guess I’m not the only…
Suppose your colleague left her job tomorrow and you needed to recreate, and double check, all of the work she produced for a research study just completed. You probably couldn’t do it. Think of every step along the way: exactly how the survey was programmed, how data were cleaned, why certain respondents and not others…