Archive for the ‘Market Research’ Category
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
Many of us in marketing research have been deploying web surveys for over ten years, and web surveys are, by far, the dominant mode of data collection in our industry nowadays. But our techniques and methods are an amalgam of practices adapted from other data collection modes, learned in part through trial and error, and taught to others through channels more akin to oral traditions. So it is helpful when our academic colleagues manage to document and codify the art and science of what we do. (more…)
Tags: bias, Internet, Market Research, Online Surveys, Sampling, statistics, Survey Design
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Data Collection, Market Research, Online Surveys, Resources and Recommendations, Sampling, Survey Design | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
In last year’s cliffhanger episode of “Can a Focus Group Save Spider-Man?” we pondered whether market research was powerful enough to save a Broadway show from doom and destruction. After crushing reviews from theater critics, the producers hired a market research firm to help them rewrite the show.
Guess what? It worked. (more…)
Tags: concept testing, Focus Groups, Market Research
Posted in Focus Groups, Market Research, New Products and Innovation | No Comments »
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 29th, 2011
Even if you are not involved in political polling, it is worth paying attention to the methods and best practices of political pollsters. One reason is that few other areas of research offer a way to completely validate one’s methods. Pollsters are using sampling and survey methods to predict the behaviors of a much larger population. Then in just one day that population behaves, we get a near-perfect count of exactly how they behaved, and we know whether the methods worked.
Several industry colleagues have recently been debating the merits of calculating and reporting “margins of error” in political polling, and pointed us to some surprising data from The New York Times: (more…)
Tags: journalism, public opinion, Public Polls, Sampling, statistics, survey
Posted in Market Research, Methods & Tools, Omnibus Surveys, Public Polls, Sampling | No Comments »
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
We recently received and reviewed an excellent book summarizing practical findings from academic marketing research. It is called Consumer Insights: Findings from Behavioral Research. It is published by the Marketing Science Institute and we highly recommend it. Why is it so good and useful for corporate researchers and marketers?
- It provides a quick overview of what we know in various areas of marketing
- It is organized into 42 useful topics, most of which are relevant to nearly all marketers
- Each topic provides universal findings based on research from hundreds of studies, not just one or two
- Each topic/chapter is short and to the point (just two or three pages)
- Each topic outlines insights, the evidence base, and managerial implications
(more…)
Tags: insight, Market Research, marketing, research
Posted in Market Research, Resources and Recommendations | 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, November 23rd, 2011
Versta Research is a strong advocate for using online panels for surveys. As telephone usage and technology have changed, phone surveys are increasingly difficult and expensive, and they are not necessarily more rigorous than other methods.
But that doesn’t mean “anything goes” when it comes to fielding market research surveys and public opinion polls through online panels. Many panels are poorly managed and overused, and some have high proportions of fraudulent respondents. While conducting good research through online panels is possible, it requires a great deal of effort and oversight from smart people who know what they are doing.
I was reminded of this recently as we worked with a newer panel provider that recruits respondents through not-for-profit organizations. (more…)
Tags: Internet, Online Panels, Online Surveys, Sampling, social media
Posted in Data Collection, Market Research, Methods & Tools, Online Surveys, Sampling | No Comments »
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
MaxDiff is a powerful method and it is increasingly popular among market researchers. But it is not always the best choice for measuring the importance of attributes, and here’s why.
Suppose you want to measure the importance of 12 attributes for a new product or service. If you know ahead of time that consumers are going to say that all 12 are extremely important to them, then MaxDiff is an excellent method for differentiating among the attributes so you can focus on the top two or three that matter most.
But what if you don’t know that all 12 attributes are extremely important? Maybe none of them are. Maybe they run the gamut from unimportant to extremely important. The problem with MaxDiff is that it only tells you the importance of attributes relative to each other, but it won’t tell you whether the attributes are important. The MaxDiff model will assign ratio-level numbers so that you can rank and quantify the importance of each attribute vis-à-vis the others. But it will not anchor the attributes in a meaningful way. (more…)
Tags: conjoint, Market Research, MaxDiff, Survey Design
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Market Research, Methods & Tools, Survey Design | 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 »
