Don’t waste money delighting your customers. That’s the message from an intriguing new study and report just issued by the Corporate Executive Board. Why not delight your customers? Because meeting expectations is enough to keep them loyal. Going beyond those expectations and “delighting” them has no measurable impact on loyalty. Quoting from the report: Most…
Versta Research has just published is spring 2014 newsletter which features a short video on how to do pricing research. If you ever work with price and demand data, and need to figure out the optimal price for your product or service, here are two great tools worth knowing about: 1. PowerPoint (yes, that says…
Question order in surveys matters a lot more than most of us realize, which makes it critical to assess what you most want to know before your survey respondents are influenced (or, in the language or survey experts, “primed”) by additional questions on the topic. Here is a superb example from last fall’s political polling…
Every year I enjoy getting an invitation to participate in Bon Appétit’s “most important survey of the year” because it provides so many good lessons for survey research. This year it has me thinking about the absurd e-mail subject line that says: “We need your help to get 100% participation.” Bon Appétit has 1,442,388 subscribers. …
Progress bars that show respondents how far along they are in a survey have become standard in our industry. But are progress bars a documented “best practice” for survey research, or just another convention? A recent article in the Social Science Computer Review offers a meta-analysis of 32 field experiments designed to see whether progress…
I’m not sure if this cartoon is funny because I don’t really get it. But it was interesting enough that I started thinking about the null hypothesis, and what it means, and how statistics is changing so quickly that “the null hypothesis” we learned about in our classes may soon feel like an odd artifact…
Every year I offer my top picks for summer intensive training courses on research methods, and usually I point to several universities for the sake of options and a full range of methods. Well, this year I am pointing to just one. I looked at the course listings at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research…
Last week we wrote about the optimal number of benefits, features, or claims you should make in your marketing materials. Research shows that three maximizes the impact because it aligns with a buyer’s sense of data sufficiency. Going beyond three invites skepticism because it reminds buyers that the message is “just marketing,” not information. So…
If you do concept testing that involves evaluating messages, ad copy, value propositions, benefits claims and so on, chances are you get to the end of the study and say, “Now I know which messages are best. But how many should I use?” New research just published in the Journal of Marketing suggests that the…
It might seem that turning data into stories happens entirely at the back end of research when data are analyzed and insights are synthesized into reports. Not so. It requires careful thought at every step from the very beginning (during design) to the very end (during fact-checking). The entire data collection process is no exception. …