Personas Are Fake Customers. Here’s Where They Come From and Why They Are So Useful.
Personas are fictional representations of customer types, but they reflect the demographics, behaviors, goals, and motivations of people derived from real data.
Don’t Be Fooled by the Mean (or How to Avoid Absurd Statistical Claims in Your PR and Market Research Surveys)
An article in The New Yorker claimed that a hundred years ago most Americans died in their mid-fifties. Alas, they were fooled by a statistic and the claim is not true.
Data Visualization Is Not the Silver Bullet You Hoped For
It is magical thinking to believe that charts and graphs and fancy new tools for data visualization will solve the challenge of finding insights in data.
What Do Gen Z Marketing Students Think of Research?
Imagine a class of undergraduate students in business marketing taking their first—maybe their only—marketing research class. What is the toughest part of research for them? After one lecture and an assignment, we asked them, and nobody said math or statistics. We’ve just published the Versta Research Summer Newsletter and our feature article, What Do Gen…
Five Mid-Year Resolutions to Inspire Better Research in 2021
With all the strange business disruptions of the last 16 months, and the ways in which the coronavirus shifted the foundations of market research, July 1 feels a lot more like the beginning of a new year than January 1 did. Life is back to normal, we hope! This “new year” inspires us to take…
The Rigors of Good Research: Three Examples from Thought Leadership
One of the biggest challenges Versta Research faced during the first year of COVID-19 was a huge and puzzling spike in the amount of fraud on research panels. We saw many organizations falling victim to this fraud. There were obviously false studies with absurdly sensational headlines being published by the media and in scientific journals.…
Two Pie Charts that Work Beautifully (and Four Reasons Why)
Like most researchers who take data visualization seriously, I am not a fan of pie charts. But yesterday I came across a pair of pie charts that display data in a striking and visually compelling way. Indeed, they tell a story with data better than other alternative types of charts. The story here is obvious,…
How to Use Surveys for Thought Leadership on a Shoestring Budget
If you need super-fast, super-cheap (but rigorous) research insights for thought leadership content, the just-published Versta Research Summer Newsletter is for you. It features an article, How to Use Surveys for Thought Leadership on a Shoestring Budget, that describes (in a video!) a new DIY process we used to launch ten extremely fast snapshot surveys…
The Quirk’s Deck
Thank you for your interest in our July 16, 2020 presentation at the Quirk’s Event! Here is the deck we used for that presentation. Feel free to download and circulate. Soon, we will have a full video of the presentation available, as well. It will be part of the Summer 2020 Versta Research Newsletter. If…
The Best New Tool for Fixing Your Research Reports
Quite by accident, I just discovered the best new tool for reading and fixing research reports: the Read-Aloud function in Microsoft Office programs. It helps spot typos, missing or extra words, misspellings, grammatical mistakes and awkward phrases — everything I need to fix my writing before finalizing and sharing written text about research and surveys…