After spending $65 million and previewing the show over sixty times since the end of last year, the producers of the new Spider-Man musical in New York are turning to focus groups and surveys in hopes that market research can do something…anything…to save the amazing Spider-Man from destruction. Last week, theater critics roundly panned the…
Unless your company has a department dedicated to it, market research can be a hard sell because higher level executives may not believe in the value of research. At Versta, we have a certain sympathy with these executives. In our view, market research in and of itself has little value; it is the outcomes of…
A pet-peeve of mine is that many (way too many) market research professionals talk about “actionable insights” and I almost never know what they are talking about. I suspect most of them don’t either. The more our clients complain that research reports are sitting on shelves collecting dust, the louder every research firm starts proclaiming…
Early this month, David Blackwell, a prominent statistician and mathematician died at the age of 91. For many he is well known because he was the first African American to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. For others, he is well known because he wrote an important and early book about Bayesian statistics,…
We saw an ad today for a downloadable survey app similar to Survey Monkey or Zoomerang 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.
Today, an industry colleague (another owner of a market research firm) 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 usually 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 recent New York Times article provides a nice example when it comes to polls about health care.
It hurts, but when your customers hate you, you should be listening all the more carefully: You need to find out the who, what, where, when, and why they hate you. Probe deeply with focus groups, in-depth interviews, social media monitoring, and survey research. Rigorous research done right (our specialty) will give you valuable insight. …
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…