If you crave a deep understanding of why your customers choose one product, concept, or message over another, you might be thinking that deep-dive qualitative research is best. Possibly it is, but you should also be considering a research method at the opposite end of the spectrum: conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is one of the…
A good friend and client likes to joke during every project: “Remember Joe, correlation does not imply causation.” Well, I thought she was joking. Surely everybody with a job in marketing research knows this? Apparently not. Even professors at fancy business schools seem to forget it, as evidenced by this snippet of an article a…
Communicating statistics is sometimes harder than doing statistics. While statistics is all about formulas and logic and precision, words and sentences are all about communicating layers of meaning that are often ambiguous and nuanced. For this reason we often recommend a quick, online refresher course called “Math for Journalists” for our PR, marketing, and journalism…
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…
We love this cartoon because it raises such interesting issues about probability and prediction in market research. Here’s a quiz. Suppose you own a retail store and want us to help predict which customers that come through the door will buy. You want to focus your sales efforts on the best prospects. We do our…
I’m always inspired by this video from Vi Hart, who describes herself as a “mathemusician.” She doodles and draws, finds numeric patterns and insights as she does it, and weaves interesting (and funny) stories around those insights.
We came across these images in a series of humorous montages that professionals had created about what they do. This one was created by Jason Sullivan.
The hardest part of quantitative market research is not that it involves numbers, math, or even statistics, but that it involves complex problems in probability. Over the past several years, psychologists have been documenting how difficult it is for us humans to solve even “simple” probability problems. One fascinating example is a puzzle known as…
Learning the math behind market research is not easy because there is no programmatic way to master it as a body of learning. It is not like algebra, geometry, calculus, or statistics in high school or college. It is complex and multifaceted and draws upon nearly every area of theoretical mathematics, but it must be…
Our March 2011 newsletter focuses on conjoint research, which we consider to be one of the most clever and powerful techniques of survey research. Why? Because it allows us to build working models of decision-making. Conjoint works by presenting people with scenarios that are more like the real-life trade-offs they always make. For example, instead…