Archive for the ‘Turning Data into Stories’ Category
Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
One powerful way to gain visibility and credibility in your marketplace is by sponsoring survey research that documents problems and solutions in areas where you have expertise. To be successful, it requires (1) rigorous research carefully designed to uncover the right topics, and (2) savvy PR work that uses data to tell a credible and compelling story.
The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and the American Statistical Association have just published a handy guide for PR professionals that outlines best practices for using, interpreting and reporting statistics in press releases and other PR materials. Some of those best practices include the following: (more…)
Tags: communication, journalism, media, news, omnibus, Public Relations, statistics, stories
Posted in Omnibus Surveys, Presenting Research, Public Relations, Turning Data into Stories | 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, October 13th, 2011
Many of us have uneasy feelings when reading statistics that presumably apply to ourselves and our own lives. Often the statistics do not seem to “fit” and seem to misrepresent the lives of real people from which the statistics are derived. It is with good reason that we chuckle when someone tells us that the average U.S. household has 0.64 children in it.
We were reminded of this upon hearing prominent news reports a few days ago that the average household income in the U.S. has fallen by about 10% in the past decade, most of it happening since the start of the recession four years ago. But does that mean most Americans’ incomes are falling? No. Though it is hard not to think so given how the data are being presented and reported.
(more…)
Tags: communication, data, Public Polls, statistics
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Presenting Research, Public Polls, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
It's pretty, but it's chartjunk
Turning data into stories involves not just words, but pictures as well. In the world of quantitative market research, that usually means charts, graphs, and tables. Moreover, just like poorly written sentences that often complicate rather than clarify data, charts and graphs in market research too often suffer from “chartjunk,” as Edward Tufte calls it. Any superfluous details, design elements, or decorations that do not tell the viewer something new about the data are chartjunk.
At Versta Research we write a lot of reports. We also revise others’ reports to help our clients find and more clearly present research stories to their management teams. Here are three of the more common chart design mistakes we see and help our clients avoid: (more…)
Tags: charts, Market Research, satisfaction research, stories, visualizing data
Posted in Charts and Data Visualization, Market Research, Methods & Tools, Presenting Research, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
Monty Hall in Let's Make A Deal
The hardest part of quantitative market research is not that it involves numbers, math, or even statistics, but that it involves complex problems in probability.
Over the past several years, psychologists have been documenting how difficult it is for us humans to solve even “simple” probability problems. One fascinating example is a puzzle known as the Monty Hall dilemma based on the 1960’s game show Let’s Make A Deal. Monty would offer his contestants three doors to choose from, one of which had a valuable prize behind it. After the contestant chose, Monty would open one of the other two doors, deliberately choosing one that had no prize behind it. Then he offered the contestant an option of staying with the original choice, or switching to the other unopened door. Which should the contestant do? (more…)
Tags: conjoint, data, Market Research, mathematics, Sampling, statistics, stories
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Market Research, Presenting Research, Sampling, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, July 14th, 2011
How statistics are calculated and presented has a huge effect on how audiences interpret information and make decisions. A recent study about medical decisions based on drug efficacy data highlights the critical importance of how you turn your data into stories, no matter what industry. The research shows that different stories, all of them true and all of them based on the same data will lead to sharply different assessments and decisions. An article in the New York Times summarized one scenario tested by the researchers:
If your doctor tells you that highly reliable studies have shown that taking a certain pill will cut your risk of getting a serious disease in half, would you take it?
Suppose he adds that the risk is 2 percent for people who do not take the pill, but your risk will be reduced to 1 percent if you do. Would you still take it? And what would you do if he told you that only one of every 100 patients who take the drug will actually benefit from it?
The doctor could have said any of these things, all truthfully, because they are just different ways of describing the same data. (more…)
Tags: communication, data, Market Research, research, stories, visualizing data
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Market Research, Presenting Research, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, July 7th, 2011
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…)
Tags: communication, conjoint, Market Research, product innovation, research, statistics, stories
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Future Trends, Market Research, Methods & Tools, New Products and Innovation, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, April 28th, 2011
As much as we love numbers, we find ourselves often advising clients against using numeric scales in their surveys. A numeric scale is any response format that asks people to give a number within a certain range to indicate the strength of their feeling or opinion. The insanely popular survey question used to calculate Net Promoter Scores is a good example:
“How likely is it that you would recommend Acme Solutions to a friend or colleague? Please answer on a scale from zero to ten, where zero means not at all likely, five is a neutral score, and ten means extremely likely.”
There are many good reasons to use numeric scales and many types of research for which numeric scales are optimal. The NPS scale is good because it has eleven points with meaningful endpoints and a meaningful midpoint. Research shows that scales like this can be highly reliable and valid, with sufficient variability to allow for sophisticated statistical modeling.
But if your objective is to use survey data for marketing materials, public relations, news releases, or white papers, numeric scales make things difficult. They are not easy to summarize in words, and if you want to use charts that tell quick, compelling stories, you will end up having to do something like this:
A Poor Fit: Pie Charts and Numeric Scales
(more…)
Tags: charts, communication, Data Collection, journalism, media, news, omnibus, Public Relations, stories, Survey Design, visualizing data
Posted in Charts and Data Visualization, Data Collection, Omnibus Surveys, Presenting Research, Public Relations, Survey Design, Survey Tips, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, March 24th, 2011
One of the most powerful pieces of advice our clients sometimes hear is to stop researching and start marketing. In fact, a client told us yesterday that our presentation of findings last year was good, useful, impressive . . . all that. But it was when we said, “Stop worrying about the next level of precision and rigor that you could get with this data if you had more money and time to invest. These data are strong. They’re based on sound methods. We have good answers to your questions. Go put it to use.” They did, and their business is blossoming.
It’s an oddly common situation we find ourselves in these days: advising our client against more research. For advocates of information and fact-based strategies (including us), the increasingly central role for market research is gratifying. But too many surveys and research-for-research’s-sake can’t sustain itself, nor should it. Market research only matters if it is acted upon and used in smart and strategic ways.
How do you know if, instead of research, you should focus on a full-force marketing effort or at least a better strategic plan before launching research? Here are three situations we typically see: (more…)
Tags: insight, Market Research, satisfaction research, stories
Posted in Market Research, Turning Data into Stories, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
Last quarter we wrote about Magic Numbers in Market Research—those arbitrary rules of thumb and cut-off points we use when quoting things like minimum samples sizes or how many people to include in a focus group. Presto! Like magic, the issue appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago, this time related to a dispute about the best way to statistically test for the existence of ESP.
The backstory: A respected academic journal in social psychology published an article showing data that suggests ESP exists. Horrified, some researchers argued that psychologists were using old-fashioned inferential statistics when they should be using modern-day Bayesian statistics. Here is a link to the article, if you’re interested. Unfortunately, it does a lousy job explaining what Bayesian statistics is.
But fortunately, in response, the editor in chief of The Annals of Applied Statistics submitted a letter to the New York Times clarifying that all statistics ends up relying on arbitrary magic numbers: (more…)
Tags: Focus Groups, Market Research, mathematics, statistics, stories
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Focus Groups, Market Research, Methods & Tools, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
