The U.S. Census is one of the most useful tools for research and marketing because it tells you how many people fit specific demographic profiles and where they live. It started out as a simple count of how many people live in each state in order to allocate congressional seats. But it has since become a rich…
We recently offered an article about needing to “punish test” surveys lest you end up with a mess of mistakes like text piping that fails, or survey layouts that do not to adapt to user devices. But how do you actually punish test a survey? The best way, we think, is to start with a…
Versta Research fields omnibus surveys, and we often recommend such surveys for our clients. But omnibus surveys do no not always save money or offer the insights that are needed, and so we often recommend inexpensive alternatives as well. In years past, data collection was a slow, complicated, and expensive task. If you had just…
If you crave a deep understanding of why your customers choose one product, concept, or message over another, you might be thinking that deep-dive qualitative research is best. Possibly it is, but you should also be considering a research method at the opposite end of the spectrum: conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is one of the…
Telling stories is a natural human behavior, but also highly complex and difficult to imitate or automate. This means that, happily, trolls can’t tell stories. And asking survey respondents for an extremely brief story (even just a few words) about their experience related to a survey topic can help you differentiate real respondents from fake…
Market research isn’t dead. It just keeps moving around and re-inventing itself as organizational needs for primary research change. Some of it has moved to operations groups, and now focuses exclusively on Customer Experience (CX). Some of it has moved to User Experience (UX) groups, as we have noted in a few recent articles (6…
A survey platform we have been using launched a new service promising an “expert review” of our surveys before we send them out for data collection. Unfortunately, it is a gimmick. It turns out that there are no experts reviewing our surveys. An artificial intelligence robot reviews them. It was interesting to see which best…
The online customer satisfaction survey I received today had me noticing an unfortunate side-effect of the NPS (Net Promoter Score) schema and visual imagery. For those of you unfamiliar with NPS as a way to measure and track customer satisfaction, here is how it goes. In your survey ask: “How likely are to recommend Acme…
Conducting surveys with your own customers is surprisingly difficult anymore. Phone options are dead, and online surveys are tough, because nobody answers or responds anymore. So what’s a researcher, strategist, or marketing professional to do? How about conducting a paper-based mail survey. It sounds crazy, but we just did it, and it succeeded beyond what…
While it is tempting to use advanced programming to “force” good answers and good behavior out of survey respondents, don’t do it. Let respondents make mistakes. Let them mess up, and then review who messes up. This is one of the best ways to assess data quality in a survey, and trust me you will…