Archive for the ‘Turning Data into Stories’ Category
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
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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 »
Friday, December 17th, 2010
With the magic of the holidays upon us, we got to thinking about “magic” in market research, or the lack thereof. So our just- published quarterly newsletter focuses on magic numbers in market research, arguing that certain “magical” numbers seem to guide much of what we do, whether we realize it or not. The best researchers know the difference between the real magic of numbers and the not-so-real. We hope you find our commentary useful.
There is also, of course, the magic of story-telling, which market research can embrace, but rarely does. We were inspired by a recent New York Times interview with Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net. What could be more boring than online file storage? But as Levie said: (more…)
Tags: confidence intervals, Market Research, mathematics, response scales, Sampling, statistics, stories
Posted in Market Research, Presenting Research, Public Polls, Sampling, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
A pet-peeve of mine is that many (way too many) market research professionals talk about “actionable insights” and I almost never know what they are talking about. I suspect most of them don’t either. The more our clients complain that research reports are sitting on shelves collecting dust, the louder every research firm starts proclaiming that it delivers actionable insights. Some even claim to have tools that, with the click of a button, deliver actionable insights right to your desktop.
Besides the ugliness of taking a verb (to act) and turning it into a noun (action) and then forcing that into an adjective (actionable), “actionable insight” just doesn’t mean much in our industry. Now we have clients with reports full of “actionable insights” collecting dust on their shelves.
In our view, the problem is that few research professionals make an explicit link in the design phase of their research between the data that will be generated, and the specific decisions that need to be made. If that link is not specified, then even if the report is rich, detailed, and full of insight, chances are it will not be used. And if it is not used, it probably was not “actionable” to begin with. (more…)
Tags: data, insight, research, research design, satisfaction research, Survey Design
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Future Trends, Market Research, Survey Design, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
One way you can make a research report really pop is to carefully select and edit quotes from the people involved in the study. For qualitative research, that means pulling quotes from transcripts of in-depth interviews, focus groups, online bulletin boards, social media, etc. For survey research, it means pulling quotes from open-ended questions that were recorded verbatim.
Editing is key, however. Who wants to read something in the halting, choppy, in-eloquent speech that most of us use in talking? A killer quote is one that is short, direct, pithy, and on point. Achieving this requires a journalistic standard for presenting quotes. What does that mean? Here are some steps: (more…)
Tags: Focus Groups, journalism, Market Research, media, open-ends, qualitative research, stories
Posted in Focus Groups, Presenting Research, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
Friday, October 29th, 2010
Research without an audience, like the title of this article, is ridiculous. By the time you figure out if the research makes any sense – if it is even true – you realize perhaps that nobody may really care. If research is not done for somebody to answer critical questions they have, then there is little reason to do it. It is unfortunate that much research today is done simply for the sake of research.
One reason that research often has no audience is that market research professionals are sometimes too isolated. They operate like accountants or IT programmers who fill orders and data requests. They do not interact enough with the marketing teams and other business professionals who could really use their help solving problems and answering key questions. This is especially true on the vendor side, where many spend their time interacting with clients who are, themselves, research professionals.
Our approach at Versta Research is the opposite. We see it as vital to operate beyond the confines of our technical expertise, because our expertise only matters if it is driven by, understood, and then put to use by our marketing and business colleagues.
To this end, I am delighted to have been recently appointed to the Board of the American Marketing Association (AMA) Chicago Chapter, serving as Director of Market Research. (more…)
Tags: Market Research
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