What Do Gen Z Marketing Students Think of Research?

What Do Gen Z Marketing Students Think of Research?

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 Rigors of Good Research: Three Examples from Thought Leadership

The Rigors of Good Research: Three Examples from Thought Leadership

One of the biggest challenges Versta Research faced during the first year of COVID-19 was a huge and puzzling spike in the amount of fraud on research panels. We saw many organizations falling victim to this fraud. There were obviously false studies with absurdly sensational headlines being published by the media and in scientific journals.…

The Best New Tool for Fixing Your Research Reports

The Best New Tool for Fixing Your Research Reports

Quite by accident, I just discovered the best new tool for reading and fixing research reports: the Read-Aloud function in Microsoft Office programs. It helps spot typos, missing or extra words, misspellings, grammatical mistakes and awkward phrases — everything I need to fix my writing before finalizing and sharing written text about research and surveys…

Focus on Solutions in PR Surveys

Focus on Solutions in PR Surveys

A public relations client early in my career gave this assessment of my work:  “Joe is strong at highlighting problems, but what I really care about is solutions.”  That was many years ago, after I left university teaching and started doing client work full time.  Her words have stayed with me and deeply shaped the…

How to Trap Survey Trolls: Ask Them for a Story

How to Trap Survey Trolls: Ask Them for a Story

Telling stories is a natural human behavior, but also highly complex and difficult to imitate or automate. This means that, happily, trolls can’t tell stories. And asking survey respondents for an extremely brief story (even just a few words) about their experience related to a survey topic can help you differentiate real respondents from fake…

Here Is a Video Report That Engages Its Audience with Animation and Insight

Here Is a Video Report That Engages Its Audience with Animation and Insight

We have experimented with different styles and formats for reporting research results over the years, including traditional report decks, animated PowerPoint, infographics, headline reports, whitepapers, and live (sometimes video-recorded) presentations. But we have never quite taken the step of creating a video report as the primary presentation of research findings. A client just did it…