Every year I review and suggest summer classes that researchers might consider to learn all the newest techniques for research design and analysis. But for researchers who work in corporate settings, many of those classes are not practical. Who has the luxury of hanging out in Ann Arbor for six weeks to brush up on…
Besides market research, another job I have (as a labor of love) is working for Henry, an organic farmer. He knows a lot more about “marketing” and “marketing research” than a lot of egg-head researchers I know. So if you want to understand consumer barriers when it comes to buying healthy, delicious, and sustainable food,…
What do you do when faced with a skeptical audience of business executives who are predisposed to disagree with your research findings? It is tempting to leave out the boring methodological details of how your research was conducted, who you interviewed, your assessment of the data’s validity and reliability, and so on (“Toss all that…
We just completed a very cool research project (a concept test) that perfectly demonstrates the power of MaxDiff and TURF analysis. These two techniques can help you make smarter product decisions than other types of concept tests. Here is an overview of what we did and why it was so powerful. We asked consumers to…
The best innovation in qualitative methods over the last decade is not online focus groups or bulletin boards or MROCs (Market Research Online Communities). It’s the smartphone. Your customers can snap pictures, take videos, and document all their thoughts and behaviors as they go about their everyday lives, generating some of the richest qualitative data…
A really good qualitative researcher knows how hard (and how frustrating) it can be to get respondents to tell us things we want to know. We have our interview guide, with all our questions laid out in a nice logical progression. But often when we ask questions, respondents have less to say than we had…
Here’s an unfortunate reality in the world of survey research: Survey questions can sometimes be copyrighted. When certain questions (no matter how obvious and common) are asked together as a set, and then scaled into a single measure (no matter how obvious and simple), and then validated in a study as being a solid tool…
Here is an update on what went wrong with the Clinton vs. Trump polling debacle last fall, according to AAPOR’s official Evaluation of 2016 Election Polls in the U.S. that was released several weeks ago. The conclusions are based on an analysis and assessment of publicly available polling data plus additional data supplied by top…
If you grew up in the United States, you probably think big numbers are better when it comes to rating things. Higher scores on school exams are better. Higher scores in games and sports are usually better. Higher credit scores are better. Five-star restaurants are definitely better than one-star restaurants. In Germany it is often…
The pointy-hair boss has a point here, even though he does not realize it. From a research perspective, focus groups should provide rich, new, and surprising depths of insight, not necessarily “reliable” data. In fact, that’s why we typically suggest doing multiple focus groups, in different locations, with different types of participants. We want each…