One of our heroes at Versta Research is David Blackwell, a prominent statistician and mathematician who died at the age of 91 very soon after we opened our doors for business (sixteen years ago!) For many he is well known because he was the first African American to be elected to the National Academy of…
We saw an ad today for a downloadable survey app that was pitched as a tool for actionable insights. Wow! Download, install, run . . . click again, and there they are, sitting on your desktop or smart phone: actionable insights. Is this possible? No. It unfortunately confuses the tools of market research and public…
An industry colleague (another owner of a market research firm) once said to me, “We all lust after those big tracking studies.” For most market research firms, tracking studies are attractive because they involve big samples, multiple ongoing deliverables, and multi-year commitments, all of which means predictable, ongoing (and sometimes substantial) revenue. At Versta Research,…
A colleague in market research once complained to me that he felt bored and unchallenged by all the client satisfaction and loyalty research he was doing, claiming he had mastered it to the point that he could do satisfaction and loyalty research in his sleep. I was struck because I could not think of any…
When multiple surveys about the same topic give different results, consider yourself lucky. It provides an opportunity to dissect and understand the question you are trying to answer in a way you might not get otherwise. A New York Times article from several years ago provides a nice example when it comes to polls about…
For some reason I’m always a little surprised that people tell the truth on surveys. I like to think of my “healthy skepticism” as a professional asset, because it forces us to check and double check, corroborate and triangulate. Before we commit to the findings of a research effort, we need to feel 100% sure…
You might think that a research firm specializing in surveys would be glad to see a world in which customer feedback surveys are everywhere. Not so. I take part in a lot of webinars, and unfortunately I am asked to complete a survey (at least one) every time I attend. Some websites ask me to…
We are big fans data visualization (in addition to presenting data with numbers and tables). But even the basics of visualizing data can be challenging, so it is worth thinking about how and when to use some of the simplest tools, like pie charts and bar charts. Pie charts can be particularly challenging because they…
One of the cool things about social science and marketing research is that it brings together mathematics and human behavior. Mathematics is beautiful, elegant, and abstract. It is much like art. Human behavior is messy, contradictory, and frustrating, desperately in need of a way to make sense of it. Bringing the two together – turning…
It is magical thinking to believe that charts and graphs and fancy new tools for data visualization will solve the challenge of finding insights in data.