By elephants, we mean Republicans. Or maybe you have too many Democrats. Maybe it keeps going back and forth, which is the problem that Gallup sometimes has. In the spirit of learning all we can from election season polling, this week we focus on whom to include (or exclude) in your research, analysis, and market…
If you ever feel like strangling the next research consultant who promises to deliver “actionable insights” then you can join me and the Dilbert team in making fun of it instead. Not only is it a horrid phrase, but it is unfortunately meaningless now that every research firm claims to be different from others by…
The first lesson I learned in one of my graduate-level research methods class was surprising and simple: You need variation in your data if you want to do statistical analysis. In other words, you cannot identify the causes, predictors, or so-called “drivers” of an outcome unless you have a whole variety of different outcomes in…
When all of the hype and uncertainty around social media settles down, market researchers will likely see it as “merely” another useful channel through which to gather data and opinions from the audiences they care about, just like surveys, focus groups, or ethnographies. In the meantime it is good fun to read articles, like this…
In a typical graduate-level research course on survey methods, students are taught to ask demographic questions about race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, etc. at the end of a survey. The questions are typically off-topic, and they sometimes scare away respondents who feel such questions are intrusive. But with most surveys now fielded through online survey…
If you want to know the future of market research, forget about what the futurists and innovation gurus have to say. Instead, just ask the next generation of marketing and business professionals—the people who will be our future. That’s what we did in a recent survey of business students about market research. We talked with …
Most research professionals know there is a kernel of sad truth in this Dilbert cartoon. But it is not because the world is random, so that made up numbers work just as well as accurate numbers. It is because research is often not used at all, in which case the difference between real numbers and…
Conventional wisdom is that your current customers are your best customers. Indeed, when marketers focus on cross-selling as a strategy, they typically see substantial increases in revenue and profit. Not only that, but when you look only at customers who cross-buy a lot, the profit from these customers is huge compared to customers who do…
How do you make a beautiful, elegant, intuitive, and useful chart showing changes in market share over time? In R. That always seems to be the answer these days when it comes to data visualization as well as data analysis. It is the reason that we at Versta Research are in the midst of…
How big of a sample size do you really need? A recent article in the New York Times cited the following statistics: A small Voice of the Customer (VoC) research company called Mindshare Technologies collects satisfaction data from 175,000 respondents every day. That’s 60 million in a year. ForeSee, a small customer experience analytics firm…