Old Marketing Poltergeists: They’re Ba-a-a-a-ack!

Old Marketing Poltergeists: They’re Ba-a-a-a-ack!

A couple of weeks ago we highlighted the top tier marketing research priorities identified by a select group of corporate executives who are members of the Marketing Sciences Institute, and who represent the corporate-user side of marketing research.  Every two years they vote on where to direct the institute’s research funds for academic research. Not…

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Seeing Red, Consumers Pay More (or Less)

“Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist. That’s just the problem for market research and consumer behavior.  Few design aspects of products, packages, brands, logos, advertising, and environments are more subjective than color.  Which…

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Using Avatars & Robots for Survey Research

Two researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau recently outlined an emerging innovation in survey research that could reverse the trend towards passive, boring, self-administered surveys that characterizes much online research.  The idea is to use internet avatars in real-time interviewing with survey respondents. Beyond just the heightened interest of having an animated survey, the avatars…

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A Better Way to Scale MaxDiff Utilities

MaxDiff is a survey method used to measure the importance of product features.  Subsets of features are presented, and respondents are asked to select which feature is most important and which feature is least important.  Its advantage over other techniques is that by forcing a choice from among multiple features, it more strongly differentiates the…