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…)
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.
MaxDiff is a survey method used to measure the importance of product features. Subsets of features are presented, and respondents are asked to select which feature is most important and which feature is least important. Its advantage over other techniques is that by forcing a choice from among multiple features, it more strongly differentiates the features if customers are prone to say that all features are important or attractive.
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…)
Versta Research just hit a magic number: 100. That’s the number of articles we have written to help our clients and their colleagues keep abreast of important trends in market research. If your market research supplier is not providing ongoing thought leadership in design, methods, and analytics, then what are the chances they are bringing ongoing and deep insight to your specific research needs?
To celebrate, we’re serving up a sampler of our five best articles. How did we decide they are the best? Our clients told us. These are the articles that they write to us about, forward to their colleagues, and for which they return to our website time and again. These are also the articles for which we get requests for print-ready PDF versions. (Just let us know if you want one!) (more…)
This past week the American Marketing Association in Chicago held its 2011 annual BrandSmart conference, bringing together top-level marketers from companies such as Groupon, Motorola, Allscripts, Cars.com, Deloitte, Coldwell Banker, Accenture, Hospira, Walgreens, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Grainger, Morningstar, and many others, all of whom shared the newest strategies and case studies for brand building and successful marketing. (more…)
Executives who lead entrepreneurial firms have dramatically different attitudes about market research from their counterparts at larger established firms, according to a recent study from Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia.
The study suggests that entrepreneurs are more focused on immediate and practical questions that will help them get their products into the hands of customers, and that traditional market research may not be the best way to get the right data and answers. That makes sense.
But according to an article in the February issue of Inc. magazine, “when asked what kind of market research they would conduct for [a] hypothetical start-up, most of Sarasvathy’s subjects responded with variations on the following: (more…)
Ever since the well-publicized “jam” experiments published ten years ago, product managers have been cautious about assuming that more choices generate higher sales. The investigators of the research found that more consumers purchased a jar of jam if the sampling table offered six varieties instead of 24. And there has been a healthy literature and many new experiments since that time exploring what has come to be known as “the paradox of choice.”
How Many Choices Are Too Many?
But there have been a number of studies and a good deal of retail research documenting the opposite as well. Indeed, it makes sense to think that offering more choice will maximize the chance of meeting individual consumers’ needs.
A recent article published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that idea of choice overload may be overblown. The authors analyzed results from fifty published and unpublished experiments on the topic. They concluded: (more…)
After spending $65 million and previewing the show over sixty times since the end of last year, the producers of the new Spider-Man musical in New York are turning to focus groups and surveys in hopes that market research can do something…anything…to save the amazing Spider-Man from destruction.
Last week, theater critics roundly panned the show, calling it among the worst Broadway shows ever. The New York Times described is as “so grievously broken in every respect that it is beyond repair.” But days after these negative reviews, a market research firm was brought in, soliciting volunteers to help fix the show: (more…)
In July, I moderated a panel of thought leaders in market research to ponder the question: “How Will Social Media Change Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty (CS&L) Research?” The event was sponsored by the American Marketing Association, and included participants from GfK, Maritz, MARC, SAS, Market Tools, and Versta Research.
The Role of Social Media in Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
A partial transcript of our panel’s deliberations was just published in the October 2010 issue of Marketing News, the AMA’s monthly magazine. Here is a quick summary of key points highlighted in the article: (more…)