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As we begin the New Year 2013 (and as Versta Research enters its fifth year in business!) my colleagues and I are thinking less about the hottest trends that dazzle, and more about a few rock-solid resolutions for the market research industry that would make research more valuable, relevant, and useful compared to last year,…
Ever worried that you might have missed something important, funny, useful, or downright insightful here at the Versta Research Blog? Fear not. For our 2012 year-in-review, we compiled, among other useful statistics, the traffic analytics from our website. Here is a list of the top five published articles or posts that our readers viewed in…
With all our excitement over the last few months about the accuracy of online polling during the election season—substantially outperforming “gold standard” telephone research—there was not time to share ESOMAR’s September 2012 updated guide to purchasing online sample. The guide consists of 28 questions all purveyors of online sample should answer, publish, and make available…
An article not too long ago in the Journal of Consumer Psychology summed up current research on brand extensions thus: What factors determine whether or not a brand extension will be successful? The most important factor identified by prior research is perceived fit. Consumers respond more favorably if they are able to perceive a fit…
This week we published Versta Research’s quarterly newsletter with a feature article entitled “Wisdom in an Age-Old Question.” While it might seem simple to ask a person’s age on a survey, it turns out that there are all sorts of ambiguities and documented sources of error in the various ways you might ask it. Fortunately,…
Successful innovation and new product development involves a great deal of customer input. The more ways in which customers are involved, and the more systematic your efforts to involve them in multiple ways, the more likely you are to succeed with an innovative product or service. This is according to new qualitative research just published…
If there is one super important lesson to be learned from this year’s round of election polling, it is that online surveys work. Google Consumer Surveys, which use non-probability online samples, predicted the election far better than Gallup did. And online surveys, overall, outperformed telephone surveys. The New York Times’ Nate Silver compiled polling results…
An extremely useful chart rarely used by market research professionals is a mekko chart, sometimes referred to as a marimekko chart. It is a stacked bar chart, but (1) the width of the bars varies in a meaningful way and (2) they are lined up next to each other. Usually the bars vary in width…
I have never been a media poll watcher or politics junkie who tracks every new poll saying which candidate is favored to win. It is hard to see the point of spending so much time and money predicting the outcome of an event that will be known with certainty within a matter of days, weeks,…
What IS a credibility interval, you ask? It is a term making its way into mainstream market research just as Bayesian statistics are making their way into market research. A credibility interval provides a range of values, calculated using Bayesian statistical techniques, within which a statistical estimate is likely to fall. It is analogous to…