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…
When all of the hype and uncertainty around social media settles down, market researchers will likely see it as “merely” another useful channel through which to gather data and opinions from the audiences they care about, just like surveys, focus groups, or ethnographies. In the meantime it is good fun to read articles, like this…
If you want to know the future of market research, forget about what the futurists and innovation gurus have to say. Instead, just ask the next generation of marketing and business professionals—the people who will be our future. That’s what we did in a recent survey of business students about market research. We talked with …
Conventional wisdom is that your current customers are your best customers. Indeed, when marketers focus on cross-selling as a strategy, they typically see substantial increases in revenue and profit. Not only that, but when you look only at customers who cross-buy a lot, the profit from these customers is huge compared to customers who do…
How do you make a beautiful, elegant, intuitive, and useful chart showing changes in market share over time? In R. That always seems to be the answer these days when it comes to data visualization as well as data analysis. It is the reason that we at Versta Research are in the midst of…
Every ten years the Census Bureau provides a count of all people living in the United States. More importantly, the Census Bureau and other agencies conduct ongoing surveys of the population to document crucial facts and figures about who we are. And every year, it seems, these agencies come under attack from politicians who would…
Summer provides an ideal opportunity to learn from our research colleagues in the academic worlds. Many of them offer short, intensive “summer camp” training that is relevant and practical for market researchers. You get training that is far more rigorous and comprehensive than courses offered by “training institutes” and other commercial providers. Here are our…
If there is a downside to the success of research in helping organizations make smarter decisions, it is the belief among some business colleagues that research is needed all the time, everywhere, and for everything. It is manifest in an obsessive focus on dashboards, KPIs, analytics, customer satisfaction surveys, pop-up website surveys, net promoter scores,…
One lesson I have learned serving on the board of the American Marketing Association in Chicago is that for most companies, research and marketing can no longer be separated. Why not? Because marketers now deal with immense volumes of data. If they want to make smart decisions and execute campaigns effectively, they need to use…
Given how common mapping capabilities have become via the Internet and smartphones, it is surprising that we don’t see more geographic mapping in market research. Researchers nearly always look at customer demographics, and a key component of a person’s demographic profile is where he or she lives. This data is far more compelling if you…