Last week I learned about a surprising niche of marketing specialists that I never knew existed: Consultants who fix terrible reports written by market research vendors. Not to toot our horn too loudly, but I received this note from Gary Schmidt, Chief Catalyst of West End Consulting, who does just this type of consulting: Joe,…
A couple of weeks ago we highlighted the top tier marketing research priorities identified by a select group of corporate executives who are members of the Marketing Sciences Institute, and who represent the corporate-user side of marketing research. Every two years they vote on where to direct the institute’s research funds for academic research. Not…
Every two years marketing executives from more than 60 corporate members of the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) vote on the most important marketing topics they need to understand better. They represent companies like Kraft, Colgate-Palmolive, Bank of America, Nielsen, and Walmart. MSI—a think tank, of sorts, whose mission is to “bridge the academic and business…
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…