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.

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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Video Content Skews Survey Results

Video Content Skews Survey Results

I am the Internet user that advertisers dread. I block as much advertising, video, flash content, and java script as I possibly can so that I stay focused on work without all that annoying, flashing, moving stuff trying to grab my attention. This always makes me wonder: Am I the Internet user that market researchers…

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A Tale of Data That Became Too Big

A Tale of Data That Got Too Big

Here is a brilliant thought experiment about big data, published as a one-paragraph short story in 1946 by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges: “. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the…

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A Quick Puzzle for Market Research Brains

A Quick Puzzle for Market Research Brains

We have just published the Versta Research Fall 2015 Newsletter, offering an interactive puzzle to test your analytical skills as a research brain. It is based on a fascinating study published half a century ago in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. When I first encountered the puzzle it stuck in my mind for quite…

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Gallup Gives Up as Phone Surveys Fail

Gallup Gives Up as Phone Surveys Fail

If ever there were evidence that phone surveys are dead, it’s this: Gallup, the undisputed king of telephone polling for decades, has withdrawn from the race. The firm announced last week that it will not conduct candidate polling for the 2016 presidential election. This comes after the miserable failure of its polling in 2012, which…

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