Five Cautions for Crowdsourcing

Five Cautions for Crowdsourcing

There is a small academic niche in market research that relies heavily on extremely cheap crowdsourcing for data. But before getting up in arms about the reliability and validity of such data, you should know this: They used to rely heavily on students enrolled in their college classes for data. Remember having to work six…

When People Take Surveys on Smartphones

When People Take Surveys on Smartphones

It amazes me that so many marketing research surveys are not responsive and optimized for mobile devices. I understand why they are not optimized, as decent mobile surveys are hard to design, and no, all the junk platforms that tout mobile optimization are not good options. But if you’re hiring a research or consulting firm,…

Amazon MTurk

Using MTurk for Market Research

A surprising trend among our academic colleagues in marketing, psychology, and the social and behavioral sciences, is that they are crowdsourcing respondents for research studies from Mechanical Turk (MTurk). I am still overcoming my own resistance to the idea, as it rubs against Versta Research’s obsessive focus on data quality. Online sampling absolutely can and…

What You Lose with Online Concept Tests

What You Lose with Online Concept Tests

Most companies test new product or service ideas with concept tests to evaluate market interest and to refine their ideas. Most of these (like most surveys, nowadays) are conducted online, which offers speed and cost efficiency. But there is a downside. While people are quite adept at reviewing ideas and answering questions in online formats,…