Satisfice is not a word you will find in most dictionaries, but it is a word you will hear often in the world of survey research. Satisficing is what survey respondents do when they “sort of” want to answer survey questions but not really. They are like lazy students taking a test. They dislike too…
In an essay published not too long ago, Stuart Rothenberg, a prominent political (and non-partisan) commentator argued that partisan pollsters (those who work directly for either Democratic or Republican candidates) do a better job than presumably objective third party pollsters. Why? Because they have to get it right. Their campaign strategies depend on it. Quoting…
One of the weirdest new uses of artificial intelligence in market research is to create “synthetic respondents” for surveys and qualitative interviews. The idea is to use information scraped from the Internet via AI’s large language models, construct a sample of synthetic people that matches the demographics of one’s target population, and then ask those…
It was a long, arduous process (and still is), but it was worth it: Versta Research has been awarded certification for compliance to ISO 27001! This is one of the most widely recognized and internationally accepted information security standards. Certification puts Versta Research among a small handful of market research and insights firms that undergo…
The word “material” points to a useful concept, and provides a welcome corrective to an obsessive and misguided focus on statistical significance.
In a test of the powers of AI, here is an impressive poem it wrote about market research. It’s worth a smile. But it’s not poetry.
Here is a brief summary of the Versta Research Spring 2023 Newsletter, which outlines five research lessons that have transformed marketing research during the pandemic years.
Imagine a class of undergraduate students in business marketing taking their first—maybe their only—marketing research class. What is the toughest part of research for them? After one lecture and an assignment, we asked them, and nobody said math or statistics. We’ve just published the Versta Research Summer Newsletter and our feature article, What Do Gen…
The U.S. Census is one of the most useful tools for research and marketing because it tells you how many people fit specific demographic profiles and where they live. It started out as a simple count of how many people live in each state in order to allocate congressional seats. But it has since become a rich…
Whether you’re a seasoned research professional, a newbie, or whether you dabble in research for other job responsibilities (like marketing or strategy) you will probably find something you don’t yet know in our winter newsletter with a feature article on 25 Things You Might Not Know About Research. It covers topics from stats, to charts,…