Versta Research Blog

Versta Research Blog

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Versta Research is a marketing research and public opinion polling firm that helps you answer critical questions with customized research and analytical expertise.

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Versta Research Blog

Explore industry trends, research methods, and tips for your own research projects in the Versta Research Blog. All opinions are our own, and some may change over time.

First time reader? Check out the Best of the Blog for the most popular posts from almost 10 years of blogging. We’re glad you’re here.

Consumers Who Help Predict Failure

Consumers Who Help Predict Failure

Early customer feedback, especially in multiple forms and from multiple channels, can make or break the success of a new product or service. But it turns out that not all customer feedback is created equal. Some people have a knack for grasping new ideas, seeing how products might be used in novel ways, or imagining…

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Be It Resolved: Revise Your Business Prose!

Be It Resolved: Revise Your Business Prose!

If you’re looking for a career-oriented new year’s resolution, there is no better way to improve your professional skills right now, including your research and marketing skills, than to write better. You will write better proposals and better reports. You will turn data into stories that people actually want to read. And with some practice…

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Better Cell Phone Sampling

Better Cell Phone Sampling

There are good reasons to avoid phone surveys if you can. But if there is no alternative, it is critical to think about strategies for integrating cell phones into your outreach and sampling. Almost half (48%) of U.S. adults have no landline telephone service, while fewer than one in ten (9%) have no cell phone…

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Does This Phone Survey Flatter Me?

Does This Phone Survey Flatter Me?

The evidence continues to mount that phone surveys should be a method of last resort. Pew Research Center has released results of an experiment conducted in 2014 to test mode differences in how surveys are administered. The research question was whether people answer survey questions differently when responding to a real person on a telephone…

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Design Thinking Invades Market Research

Design Thinking Invades Market Research

Or, at least, design thinking should be invading your market research, because it is invading the brains of business executives. The New York Times describes IBM as being on a mission to hire 1,500 design school graduates, and embedding them in all of its product teams. The Harvard Business Review published an issue in September…

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Research Tip: Write Dream Headlines

Research Tip: Write Dream Headlines

Yesterday we were in Milwaukee at a film studio, shooting for a soon-to-be-released Versta Research video about making research matter. It explains how to design and execute research to ensure that it gets heard, understood, and put into action by your business partners. The video outlines three tips. Here’s the first: begin by writing dream…

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P-Hacking and Other Bad Research Practices

P-Hacking and Other Bad Research Practices

Leave it to the National Science Foundation to keep me hip on current research lingo. A report published last May (with the very unhip title Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Perspectives on Robust and Reliable Science) offered this definition of an edgy new term in research called p-hacking: Generating many different sets of results and…

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