Learning the math behind market research is not easy because there is no programmatic way to master it as a body of learning. It is not like algebra, geometry, calculus, or statistics in high school or college. It is complex and multifaceted and draws upon nearly every area of theoretical mathematics, but it must be…
After spending $65 million and previewing the show over sixty times since the end of last year, the producers of the new Spider-Man musical in New York are turning to focus groups and surveys in hopes that market research can do something…anything…to save the amazing Spider-Man from destruction. Last week, theater critics roundly panned the…
The technology to field surveys via mobile devices has been around for a while, but has not yet gained much traction (and for good reasons). But with smartphones now proliferating at a remarkable pace, we may be in for a change. Deloitte released their 2011 IT and technology predictions last week, arguing that smartphones are…
Unless your company has a department dedicated to it, market research can be a hard sell because higher level executives may not believe in the value of research. At Versta, we have a certain sympathy with these executives. In our view, market research in and of itself has little value; it is the outcomes of…
Contrary what a methodological purist in the social sciences might recommend, we often design survey questions with scales that have no neutral midpoint or don’t know option. For example, we sometimes use scales that look like this: Rather than this: Or this: Why? Because survey respondents tend to over-use neutral midpoints or don’t know options.
Good data from a survey requires, among other things, thoughtful feedback from respondents. Low-quality data most often comes not from fraudulent or lazy respondents, but from well-meaning survey takers who are bored or irritated with surveys that are not user-friendly. In this article we focus not on the unengaged respondents who may be offering up…
A pet-peeve of mine is that many (way too many) market research professionals talk about “actionable insights” and I almost never know what they are talking about. I suspect most of them don’t either. The more our clients complain that research reports are sitting on shelves collecting dust, the louder every research firm starts proclaiming…
We are currently engaged in a research project for a client in South Korea, so issues of cross-cultural communication are top-of-mind for us right now. Whether we rely on translations, or whether we speak the same language as our clients and respondents, it is important for researchers to understand differences in how people think and…
Choosing an omnibus survey can be a simple approach to getting survey data, because it is usually inexpensive and fast, and involves asking just a few questions. But there is sometimes a downside to simplicity: You have just a few questions to get that nugget of data you’re hoping to use as a news hook…
Asking people to fill out long, tiresome, and boring surveys is a scourge of the research, polling, and survey industry. (Another is asking them to fill out a survey every time they interact with you — see There Are Too Many Surveys.) Asking people to fill out long surveys teaches them to avoid surveys in…