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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.
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It’s been four years since the AMA convened a panel of thought leaders in market research to ponder questions about how social media fits into research practices and methods. An excerpt of our discussion was published in Marketing News in 2010. Last month, another top industry group (AAPOR) released its Emerging Technologies Task Force report…
Readers of this newsletter and blog know how much we value and respect the New York Times. It is one of the few resources we cite regularly, as it always has relevant, authoritative information that informs our work and that of our clients. So my heart sank when I read this description of a new…
Last week I learned about a surprising niche of marketing specialists that I never knew existed: Consultants who fix terrible reports written by market research vendors. Not to toot our horn too loudly, but I received this note from Gary Schmidt, Chief Catalyst of West End Consulting, who does just this type of consulting: Joe,…
A couple of weeks ago we highlighted the top tier marketing research priorities identified by a select group of corporate executives who are members of the Marketing Sciences Institute, and who represent the corporate-user side of marketing research. Every two years they vote on where to direct the institute’s research funds for academic research. Not…
For the longest time I was puzzled by what it means to “over-fit” a model to one’s data. How can a model describe one’s data too perfectly? Aren’t we trying to get as close to a perfect fit as possible? This one-minute video will show you an example of over-fitting. After watching it, the odd…
Before the days of DATA MINING this was called DATA DREDGING. And for good reasons, because it was considered not a good thing. Almost any dataset will have nonsense correlations, and if you’ve turned on your magical statistical testing tool at the 95% confidence level, five out of every one hundred nonsense correlations will likely…
Every two years marketing executives from more than 60 corporate members of the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) vote on the most important marketing topics they need to understand better. They represent companies like Kraft, Colgate-Palmolive, Bank of America, Nielsen, and Walmart. MSI—a think tank, of sorts, whose mission is to “bridge the academic and business…
Leading practitioners of survey research now agree that online polling and other forms of non-probability sampling can work. The key is to give careful attention to the survey protocols, data collection, cleaning, and back-end weighting so that ultimately the sample being analyzed matches the population you want to know about in as many relevant ways…
Don’t waste money delighting your customers. That’s the message from an intriguing new study and report just issued by the Corporate Executive Board. Why not delight your customers? Because meeting expectations is enough to keep them loyal. Going beyond those expectations and “delighting” them has no measurable impact on loyalty. Quoting from the report: Most…
Versta Research has just published is spring 2014 newsletter which features a short video on how to do pricing research. If you ever work with price and demand data, and need to figure out the optimal price for your product or service, here are two great tools worth knowing about: 1. PowerPoint (yes, that says…