I resist the idea of using Twitter for research because I do not know anyone beyond journalists, PR people, and marketing folks who actually use Twitter. Well, that’s a terrible reason to dismiss a potentially rich source of data, especially because one premise of survey research is that small parts can represent the whole. My…
Having just returned from giving a presentation at the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual conference, Re:Think 2015, I learned that ARF’s “Ground Truth #2” is that brands are built in the brain. As such, the ARF has invested a good deal of time and money over the last decade exploring ways that neuroscience can be applied…
Every year I peruse the listings of summer college training courses on research methods. Part of it is nostalgia—I loved school. But I’m also looking for courses that will keep me and our Versta employees at the forefront of new knowledge and research techniques. (I didn’t learn R in graduate school, so yes, I took…
One of the cardinal sins of market research is to misrepresent the purpose of research and how it will be used. The colorful terms used for two of the most common forms for misrepresentation are SUGGING and FRUGGING. The first of these stands for Selling Under the Guise of research. The nefarious “research” firm calls…
I’m working on a presentation with a research colleague at Wells Fargo for the upcoming ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) Re:Think 2015 conference. The challenge? Getting it streamlined and condensed so that we can deliver the whole thing within a strict timeframe. All the research, all the insights, all the business outcomes from a huge national…
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.…
When we published our July 2014 newsletter on How to Make Spectacular Infographics, we spent some time looking for examples of poorly done infographics. Ultimately we decided to focus only on the positive “what-to-do” for infographics instead of the negative “what-not-to-do,” so we set those examples aside. Well, along comes the latest news magazine from…
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…
Dealing with vendors often makes me cranky, but it always reminds me of the things Versta Research should be doing when working with our own customers. Over the years I have taken careful note of the things our best vendors do to capture my loyalty. They have me turning to them again and again without…
I recently came across this strange big book, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, compiled by the Federal Judicial Center and the National Research Council. It’s not fun reading, but it provides an enormously useful and fascinating overview of what makes social and marketing research (and other kinds of scientific research, too) sufficiently rigorous to…