Like other professionals, those of us in marketing and market research sometimes fall too much in love with our specialized and often ridiculous language. It is mostly okay when we communicate with each other. But if we are communicating with customers or consumers, beware. Our words may not be their words. And since our research…
Every client we have—no matter what industry—will find something important to think about in looking at polling data on food. These polls touch on some of the “universal” questions we ask in market research, such as: How much do consumers trust the safety of products they buy? How much do they trust the companies that…
Nobody gets really good at market research by taking classes. It comes from learning on the job and in the field from other researchers. That is because researchers are always solving new problems and answering new questions that have never been asked before. That inspired us to make our summer newsletter The Big “How To”…
A feature story on the Versta Research website is about mapping shopper segments onto buyer segments. That story may have had you asking how we measured and defined those segments in the first place. The answer: by devising careful and nuanced survey questions to capture what our qualitative research partners learned about how consumers assess,…
A good friend and client likes to joke during every project: “Remember Joe, correlation does not imply causation.” Well, I thought she was joking. Surely everybody with a job in marketing research knows this? Apparently not. Even professors at fancy business schools seem to forget it, as evidenced by this snippet of an article a…
For people who love research, the most depressing thing is to produce a report that nobody cares about. It hits with a thud, or sits on a shelf. Nobody bothers to look, or to offer an encouraging word of thanks, much less acknowledge how fantastic it is. Hence the cliched claims of “actionable insights” from…
This is still raw, so I’m working hard to be constructive and not mean. But seriously, how much more self-centered can a veterinarian company be, than to send me a survey the morning after my dog dies to ask, “How did we do?” Yes, this really happened. On Friday, Lancelot (pictured above, on the day…
Yesterday I was delighted to share the stage with Kate Morris at the Corporate Researchers Conference in Chicago, talking about the power, the potential, and the “how-to” of spectacular infographics for market research. Kate spent many years in the research group at Fidelity Investments, and it was for Kate that Versta Research first tried its…
A cool deliverable of many segmentation studies is a “typing tool” that allows you to input data on just a few dimensions (usually six to twelve survey questions) in order to predict which segment any customer belongs to. It works because even though segmentation algorithms sort through tons of data to find the best clusters,…
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…