Posts Tagged ‘data’
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:
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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.
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Tags: communication, data, Public Polls, statistics
Posted in Data Analysis & Analytics, Presenting Research, Public Polls, 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 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 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, June 16th, 2011
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…)
Tags: data, insight, Market Research, product innovation, research, satisfaction research, segmentation, tracking studies, value
Posted in Future Trends, Market Research, Methods & Tools, New Products and Innovation | No Comments »
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
We are often surprised by the number of senior researchers in the market research industry who never touch raw data. Often they don’t even have the tools, since “data processing” is outsourced to lower levels or other countries. It is surprising because we almost always engage in work where getting into the data and puzzling over anomalies or hypotheses yields much deeper insight.
Here is an example of how critical it can be to look closely at your data, and in this case, very early in the data collection process. We launched an online survey last week and got reports back from our sample supplier that incidence was just one-third of what we expected, which would have serious feasibility and cost implications.
But once we looked at their report portal, we saw that for every qualified respondent completing the survey, two qualified respondents quit before finishing. That’s an unusually high ratio of “suspends” as we call them. So what was the problem? Were we just getting lousy respondents who did not want to seriously participate in a survey? Was the survey was too difficult, tedious, boring, or confusing? One source of answers (rarely examined) is to look at the data question by question to identify where in the survey people are quitting.
The story in this data: Something is wrong with your survey
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Tags: data, Data Collection, data quality, insight, research, stories, survey, survey respondents
Posted in Charts and Data Visualization, Data Analysis & Analytics, Data Collection, Methods & Tools, Survey Design | No Comments »
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
I’ve always been intrigued by the promises of data mining because it offers such a magical solution to much of what we do in market research. If only we had a tool or technology that would discover hidden patterns and insights in our data. We would not have to think so hard, or work so hard, or hire really smart people to help our clients design research, analyze data, and present findings to their executive teams.
Finding Gold in Your Data Mine
The truth, however, is that while technology and tools can multiply our capabilities and help us work better and faster, they cannot discover meaningful patterns or find hidden insights. Only smart people can do that. The reason is that market research data only become meaningful within a context of questions that need to be answered, or stories that need to be told. Tools and technology cannot supply that context.
We are working with a client who has been struggling for the last five months to find a story in survey data. They commissioned the survey to generate data for a whitepaper for presentation to business level clients and prospects. They’ve been staring at tables and banner tabs, pie charts and bar charts, correlations and gap analyses. But squeeze the data as they might, the story will not emerge. (more…)
Tags: communication, data, data analysis, data mining, insight, Public Relations, stories
Posted in Uncategorized | 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 »
Friday, August 13th, 2010
Does data displayed in charts and graphs, rather than tables, lead to better decisions? Not according to the latest research reported in this month’s Journal of Marketing Research.
The authors looked at various types of biases that creep into business managers’ decisions when based on data presented to them. They did this by conducting experiments with business school students and managers who are members of the American Marketing Association. Some were presented with numeric data in tables, while others were presented with data in charts or graphs. All tables, charts, and graphs were clear and well-designed. (more…)
Tags: bias, charts, communication, data, Market Research, statistics, stories, visualizing data
Posted in Charts and Data Visualization, Market Research, Presenting Research, Turning Data into Stories | No Comments »
