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…
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…
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…
The New York Times’ recent brand and marketing campaign is all about Truth. Well, if Truth really matters, then they desperately need a good old fashioned survey to back their flimsy claims in a recent article about how small business owners view the candidates running for president. In a front-page article of the business section…
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…
Our school teachers were right: Learning how to write effectively makes a huge difference if your job involves communication. This applies to market research and marketing. Improving your writing will help you write better reports, better surveys, and better campaigns. It’s not that hard. You need not learn the art of essays, novels, dissertations, or…
This week we published the Versta Research Summer Newsletter, which focuses on Turning Data Into Stories. Here is a preview of what’s inside to pique your curiosity. First, what do we mean by “Turning Data Into Stories?” We don’t mean creating little vignettes or personas around every finding. No narrative arcs or emotional connection points,…
Happy birthday to us! We were born on January 19, 2009 in the depths of a recession with nowhere to go but up. Many of the research firms that were around back then have disappeared, sold themselves off, closed up shop, or consolidated into behemoths. From a statistical standpoint, we beat the odds, which got…
The problem with most business approaches to “analytics” is that they rely on automated, unthinking algorithms. The algorithms scan boatloads of data and generate correlations that are surprising and, therefore, presumably deeply insightful. But in most cases the correlations are not insightful. They are random coincidences, which unfortunately does not stop humans from sharing with…
Yesterday I was delighted to share the stage with Kate Morris at the Corporate Researchers Conference in Chicago, talking about the power, the potential, and the “how-to” of spectacular infographics for market research. Kate spent many years in the research group at Fidelity Investments, and it was for Kate that Versta Research first tried its…