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I recently saw a press release about a study showing that only 19.5% of news release headlines are optimized for SEO. It brought to mind all kinds of issues about how best to report numbers in press releases. In particular it highlighted the important issue of whether specific numbers are meaningful and whether they communicate…
Conventional wisdom is that your current customers are your best customers. Indeed, when marketers focus on cross-selling as a strategy, they typically see substantial increases in revenue and profit. Not only that, but when you look only at customers who cross-buy a lot, the profit from these customers is huge compared to customers who do…
How do you make a beautiful, elegant, intuitive, and useful chart showing changes in market share over time? In R. That always seems to be the answer these days when it comes to data visualization as well as data analysis. It is the reason that we at Versta Research are in the midst of…
Most people who take surveys want to share their opinions, which is important for researchers hoping to get a few nuggets of data from willing respondents. The trouble is, if a survey it not written carefully, a respondent’s urgent desire to share their feelings may bias their answers to other questions. Two marketing professors at…
Every ten years the Census Bureau provides a count of all people living in the United States. More importantly, the Census Bureau and other agencies conduct ongoing surveys of the population to document crucial facts and figures about who we are. And every year, it seems, these agencies come under attack from politicians who would…
How big of a sample size do you really need? A recent article in the New York Times cited the following statistics: A small Voice of the Customer (VoC) research company called Mindshare Technologies collects satisfaction data from 175,000 respondents every day. That’s 60 million in a year. ForeSee, a small customer experience analytics firm…
Summer provides an ideal opportunity to learn from our research colleagues in the academic worlds. Many of them offer short, intensive “summer camp” training that is relevant and practical for market researchers. You get training that is far more rigorous and comprehensive than courses offered by “training institutes” and other commercial providers. Here are our…
We came across these images in a series of humorous montages that professionals had created about what they do. This one was created by Jason Sullivan.
We came across this chart from Invisible Children, the group that produced the Kony 2012 video. It shows the organization’s expenditures by category. It is a poorly designed chart for three reasons: 1. The pieces of the doughnut are not correctly proportional. For some reason, the arc widths were compressed for some categories (like Media…
Coincidentally in the same week that Versta Research published its winter newsletter on Turning Data into Stories: A How-To Guide, last week’s AMA event in Chicago was a market research panel focused on telling stories with data. The presentations were solid, with lots of helpful ideas. But there was also a misguided idea working its…