Archive for the ‘Future Trends’ Category
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
Given how common mapping capabilities have become via the Internet and smartphones, it is surprising that we don’t see more geographic mapping in market research. Researchers nearly always look at customer demographics, and a key component of a person’s demographic profile is where he or she lives. This data is far more compelling if you can present it visually with maps.
It does not take super fancy (and expensive) mapping software or specialized firms to create accurate, useful, and compelling maps from market research data. We recently created maps for a client showing where in a three-county region their best customers lived. Everything we used to make these maps was free and publicly available for download on the Internet. Here are the steps we used: (more…)
Tags: Market Research, visualizing data
Posted in Charts and Data Visualization, Data Analysis & Analytics, Future Trends, Market Research, Methods & Tools, Presenting Research | No Comments »
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
Over the last few years we have wondered whether spreadsheet software like Excel will soon make statistics software like SPSS or SAS obsolete.
Spreadsheets have amazingly powerful and often intuitive capabilities. They have many of the statistical functions we use every day. Younger people entering our profession rarely know programs like SPSS or SAS, and we see them turning to Excel to generate frequencies, calculate means and proportions, create charts from data, and so on. The same goes for our customers. Many do not have statistical software, so when they need numbers and statistics, they often work in Excel.
But Versta Research continues to invest in advanced statistical software rather than doing our work in Excel for three important reasons: (more…)
Tags: analytics, software packages, statistics
Posted in Charts and Data Visualization, Data Analysis & Analytics, Future Trends, Market Research, Methods & Tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Having migrated from the world of academia to market research ten years ago, I appreciate the patience and care with which my academic colleagues pursue basic research without knowing for sure how (or whether) it will be used in the real world.
But I can tell them this: It does get used, so keep doing it. It allows people like me to bring new insights and new levels of rigor to the practical and sometimes urgent research questions that our customers need to have answered.
The Journal of Marketing Research has just published a special interdisciplinary issue on Consumer Financial Decision Making. It is hot off the press, so we have yet to read it all. But in the coming weeks we’ll be reading, reviewing, and using the findings in these articles to bring deeper insight to the work that we do for our customers.
In the meantime, here are the article titles, with links to the authors’ summaries, from the special issue of JMR that focuses on research in consumer finance: (more…)
Tags: financial services, Market Research
Posted in Future Trends, Market Research | No Comments »
Thursday, October 20th, 2011
Earlier this month Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr. died. He left behind a giant and reputable market research company and a brand name recognized throughout the world. The A.C. Nielsen company was started by his father and in its early years tracked the sales of goods through grocery and drug stores. The company then moved into media tracking and became the authoritative source for measuring audience size and demographics. Nearly every company with an advertising budget continues to rely on Nielsen data to determine where to advertise and how much to spend.
Nielsen’s legacy is that he demonstrated the value of collecting and tracking data, and lots of it. Every item we purchase is now logged, counted, and tracked. Every television and radio show is tracked for how many viewers it has and in what markets they live. And of course everything we do on the Internet is recorded and tracked. Even our bodily locations are tracked via GPS or cell phone signals. Most market research firms today generate the bulk of their revenue simply by collecting, tracking, tabulating, and reporting data.
This important legacy has left us with tons of data, growing at an exponential rate, and a monumental challenge of how to synthesize it and move beyond mere tabulation and reporting. The question is, how do we meet that challenge and take Nielsen’s legacy to the next frontier? In our view, it will involve two key efforts:
(more…)
Tags: analytics, communication, data, insight, Market Research, stories, tracking studies
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Data Collection, Future Trends, Market Research, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
Two researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau recently outlined an emerging innovation in survey research that could reverse the trend towards passive, boring, self-administered surveys that characterizes much online research. The idea is to use internet avatars in real-time interviewing with survey respondents.
Beyond just the heightened interest of having an animated survey, the avatars would be programmed to register and interpret respondents’ verbal answers, facial expressions, and body language through webcams.
(more…)
Tags: Data Collection, insight, Internet, Market Research, Online Surveys, stories, survey technology
Posted in Data Collection, Future Trends, Market Research, Methods & Tools, New Products and Innovation, Online Surveys | No Comments »
Thursday, August 25th, 2011
Recent social psychological research on consumer decision making suggests that making choices and deciding among alternatives depletes mental energy. With each choice we make, it gets harder and harder to make the next choice, and our brains start looking for “shortcuts” to make the task easier. The research, reported this week in The New York Times Magazine, found that when our brains get fatigued from too many choices,
one shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. . . . The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice.
But give the brain a hit of glucose (the basic fuel that runs cell functioning), and our willpower and rational decision-making are restored.
The findings are from multiple experiments over the past decade that relied on a variety of scenarios that both academic researchers and marketing people care a great deal about: selecting (and paying for) options on new car purchases, buying computers, shopping in malls or grocery stores, selecting fabrics for customized products, and making critical financial decisions that involve trade-offs between short-term rewards and long-term gains. (more…)
Tags: choice, consumer insight, financial services, insight
Posted in Future Trends, New Products and Innovation, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, August 19th, 2011
The most recent government estimates of cell phone usage among U.S. households were released a few weeks back, and the pace at which landline usage is disappearing is astonishing. Here are just some of the numbers:
- Thirty percent of U.S. households do not have a landline telephone
- An additional 16% have a landline telephone, but never or rarely use it to receive calls
- The percentage of households without landlines is increasing by about five to six percentage points each year
- Half of young adults under age 30 have no landline in their homes
- Half of adult renters have no landline in their homes
- Nearly four out of ten Hispanic adults have no landline in their homes
(more…)
Tags: consumer behavior, Data Collection, Internet, Market Research, phone surveys, Public Polls, Sampling, social media, survey technology
Posted in Data Collection, Future Trends, Market Research, Public Polls, Sampling | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
These days most researchers agree that if you want to do a random sample phone survey of the U.S. population, you ought to include cell phones. More than one-quarter of the population do not have landline telephones at home. Those who do have landline telephones are less likely than ever to answer them, and less likely than ever to participate in surveys.
But it is not easy to include cell phones. The sampling protocols and the post-stratification weighting become more complicated. You need to account for a higher probability of cell phone owners being in your sample, because most of them also have landlines. You can’t use automated or predictive dialing to call cell phone numbers. You can’t target geography as well, because area codes and exchanges have become mobile. And people get mad at you if they have to pay for incoming calls, so you need to offer cash.
What’s the bottom line effect on costs for a survey that includes cell phones? A recent study sponsored by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) documents the following: (more…)
Tags: bias, Data Collection, Market Research, phone surveys, population, public opinion, Public Polls, research, Sampling
Posted in Data Collection, Future Trends, Market Research, Public Polls, Sampling | No Comments »
Thursday, July 28th, 2011
An issue we continually struggle with at Versta Research is how to automate the research process and leverage new technologies without losing the essence of what good research does. Good research does not report data, build charts, or generate dashboards. It learns, answers new questions, interprets data, and helps users focus on information and findings that are relevant to their needs.
The last couple of weeks we have been working with a group that specializes in coding and tabulating text responses to open-ended questions on surveys. They have tools and technology that undoubtedly make the process easier and more efficient (we have used those tools, and they are impressive). They are also have a singular focus and expertise that is supposed to help streamline the process, cut costs, and improve speed and efficiency.
The results have been mediocre at best, even with human coders working the technology and making the critical decisions. (more…)
Tags: data, insight, Market Research, open-ends, qualitative research., survey technology
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Future Trends, Market Research, Methods & Tools | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 21st, 2011
This year Ogilvy & Mather is launching a unit within its agency that focuses on cross-cultural marketing as opposed to multicultural marketing. This is an important shift in how to think about multiple markets and segmentation, and consistent with what we at Versta have been seeing in our research for quite some time. (more…)
Tags: demographics, Market Research, segmentation, statistics
Posted in Future Trends, Market Research | No Comments »
