Segmenting customers into subsets that have unique needs, interests, and priorities makes a lot of sense. The more obvious the segments are, the more it makes sense, so a priori segments are best. Big companies in one segment, small companies in another. Retirees in one segment, college students in another. You don’t need fancy K-means…
Those of us who do a lot of survey research spend tons of time poring over statistics and reading data tables. And no matter what all the latest clever tools promise, there is no shortcut to reading page after page after page of data or tables or charts, and discerning the patterns or lack thereof.…
There’s nothing worse than having your research be a pile of numbers with no obvious story. Or maybe there is. What if every random set of numbers told a story? Or, worse yet, what if our brains could find a story in every random set of numbers, even if a story is not there? There…
A persistent misperception in our industry is that technology can (or eventually will) largely automate our work. It reflects a fundamental confusion between the tools that we use versus the work that we do. This confusion was evident in a recent New York Times article about the surprising amount of time that data scientists devote…
The next time you analyze the results of your customer satisfaction or brand loyalty tracking study, and you notice an upward or downward shift, ask yourself this: Is it reasonable to think that certain customers—either the happy ones or the unhappy ones—were more willing to give you their opinions than the other group? If so,…
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…
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…
I just read an online interview with Bob Muenchen, author of R for SAS and SPSS Users. He nicely describes an important aspect of R that I found to be one of the weirdest and most difficult to grasp, but once I “got it,” fell in love. Quoting at length:
Every year I offer my top picks for summer intensive training courses on research methods, and usually I point to several universities for the sake of options and a full range of methods. Well, this year I am pointing to just one. I looked at the course listings at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research…