Last week, Versta Research celebrated its 5th birthday—an important milestone in a twenty-year journey that has involved rigorous training and building significant capabilities that help clients solve research problems. <<Applause! Singing! Cake!>> “Speech! Speech!” Hmmmm, a speech. . . . Well, recently we formulated new year’s resolutions and described where we are headed as we enter the second half…
As we get further along in our careers most of us get further away from the nitty-gritty of data collection, data coding, and sometimes even data analysis. But I always feel nervous about that distance, and usually want to take a quick scan through the raw data myself. I want to see all those rows…
Versta Research’s winter newsletter comes out next week, which will focus on some new approaches to faster (and cheaper) market research. In the meantime we have been thinking a good deal about where to invest in new methods and innovation during the coming year so that we continue to make our work better and smarter…
Or at the very least, ignorance should drive market research because fundamentally research should be about findings answers to questions that we do not already know. This idea for focusing on “ignorance” is inspired by a book published last year called Ignorance: How It Drives Science, by Stuart Firestein. Applied to our industry, the argument…
This picture sits on my bookshelf, right next to my computer monitor, and reminds me all day long about the importance of getting close to your data. It was one of my first research jobs out of college, working for Tom Greene at St. Lawrence University. We hiked up mountains in the Adirondacks, waited at…
If our last newsletter convinced you there are insights to be found in academic journals, we hope our fall newsletter will convince you of another source: Henry Brockman, organic farmer friend extraordinaire and keen observer of consumer behavior. During market season, I volunteer for and work alongside Henry at the Evanston Farmer’s Market. Here are…
Some business managers and marketing executives mistakenly believe that “big data” will deliver better insight because of the sheer volume of data now at our disposal. Now we just need the statisticians, the computing power, and the analytics software to sift through it all, right? Not so. The truth is, for most purposes you don’t…
I’m not sure if this cartoon is funny. Maybe I’m just not cynical enough (ha! my friends are laughing already!) But I can’t think of any managers or clients for whom I’ve worked that are like the pointy-haired boss in this episode. I have never been asked to provide tons of data that look so…
A mistake often made by both professional and do-it-yourself researchers is letting a survey sit in the field without actively monitoring it. Once we design a survey and put it out there for people to respond, we just wait patiently (or get busy on another project) until we have data for analysis, right? But collecting…
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…