One way you can make a research report really pop is to carefully select and edit quotes from the people involved in the study. For qualitative research, that means pulling quotes from transcripts of in-depth interviews, focus groups, online bulletin boards, social media, etc. For survey research, it means pulling quotes from open-ended questions that…
Two recent events have me thinking about AI and the problem of plausibility in market research. First, a colleague narrated a story about the first market research company he worked for 20 years ago. The owner told him that research is always tentative and uncertain, and that all we really need to achieve in our…
Does data displayed in charts and graphs, rather than tables, lead to better decisions? Not according to research published several years ago in the Journal of Marketing Research. The authors looked at various types of biases that creep into business managers’ decisions when based on data presented to them. They did this by conducting experiments…
Clients tell us that one of the biggest challenges they face is writing great research reports. There is the overwhelming difficulty of turning data into stories — making sense of volumes of data without losing the big picture or the details. And there is the difficulty of truly communicating research so that it is heard,…
Telling a story with data is one part finding the right words, and one part finding a compelling visual way to present numbers. Good visualization of data conveys the “big picture” at a glance. At the same time, it includes details so that the audience understands and sees both the whole and the parts. Effective…
We saw an ad today for a downloadable survey app that was pitched as a tool for actionable insights. Wow! Download, install, run . . . click again, and there they are, sitting on your desktop or smart phone: actionable insights. Is this possible? No. It unfortunately confuses the tools of market research and public…
An industry colleague (another owner of a market research firm) once said to me, “We all lust after those big tracking studies.” For most market research firms, tracking studies are attractive because they involve big samples, multiple ongoing deliverables, and multi-year commitments, all of which means predictable, ongoing (and sometimes substantial) revenue. At Versta Research,…
A colleague in market research once complained to me that he felt bored and unchallenged by all the client satisfaction and loyalty research he was doing, claiming he had mastered it to the point that he could do satisfaction and loyalty research in his sleep. I was struck because I could not think of any…
A truly effective research report is both parsimonious and richly nuanced. In other words, (1) it is short and to the point, and (2) it captures the complexity of reality. But how do you do both? The importance of the first was highlighted some time ago in a NYT “Corner Office” interview with Guy Kawasaki,…
When multiple surveys about the same topic give different results, consider yourself lucky. It provides an opportunity to dissect and understand the question you are trying to answer in a way you might not get otherwise. A New York Times article from several years ago provides a nice example when it comes to polls about…