For all the high level intellectual work you do in research (statistical work, design work, analysis, or writing) there is just as much brute force effort you need to put into fieldwork. That means finding the people to interview, convincing them to participate, asking them questions, and recording their answers. Even if you outsource, keeping…
Now that survey tools are easy to build and cheap to buy, the companies that sell these tools try to differentiate their offerings with various types of design enhancements. Sometimes they succeed by offering truly elegant respondent experiences with simple, intuitive, easy-to-use, and adaptable formats. Sometimes, though, it feels like all the razzle dazzle starts…
Consider three core groups that come together on most market research projects: (1) The client-side research managers (2) The supplier-side researchers (3) The research respondents. Now consider a list of some deeply rooted needs and desires of these three groups, as revealed by a recent industry research study:
Difficult or lengthy surveys require hefty incentives, which unfortunately makes it tempting for some respondents to lie. We are facing this predicament in a survey right now. The survey requires two people from the same household who share household finances to complete parallel surveys. We are recruiting from an online research panel. Person 1 gets…
In our experience, the people who write the best questionnaires are researchers who spend their time immersed in complex survey methods and quantitative analysis but who focused on qualitative research earlier in their careers. Why? Because they are deeply sensitive to the dual objectives of survey design, namely: (1) Elicit data in specific ways and…
If you found that 10% of your online survey respondents were ignoring your questions, generating random data, and there was an easy way to identify who those respondents were, what would you do? I hope you would delete them, go back to the field, and replace them. But for some reason there are those among…
OK, using the word stalker instead of remarketing lists is harsh, but it perfectly conveys the idea behind Google Consumer Surveys’ (GCS) latest innovation for market research. You can use cookie lists from web pages to target people based on specific content they are viewing. Want to survey people who were on your website last…
Two things bugged me about the market research survey invitation I got from my alma mater. First, it was a mediocre three star survey that asked me a bunch of information they could easily have gotten from my LinkedIn profile. Second, it offered a chance to win a prize if I participated, and the effort…
Just last week a client proposed having their salespeople recruit customers to take the loyalty and satisfaction survey we had launched for them. It’s a terrible idea, for exactly the reasons that Dagwood realizes with his baffled look in this cartoon. If you want honest feedback that your business unit can honestly use to improve,…
Last week we wrote about social media and market research, and suggested that industry experts agree it is not yet shaking the foundations of how we do research. So what about the other gigantic Internet development of the last decade—mobile technology? It should be shaking the foundations of how we do research. Current estimates are…