One luxury of doing primary research is that you can get data perfectly tailored to the problem you need to solve. Primary research allows you to design how data will be elicited, and how, exactly, attitudes and behaviors are measured. Hence, you get the insight you need. If you don’t have perfectly tailored data, you…
Market research isn’t dead. It just keeps moving around and re-inventing itself as organizational needs for primary research change. Some of it has moved to operations groups, and now focuses exclusively on Customer Experience (CX). Some of it has moved to User Experience (UX) groups, as we have noted in a few recent articles (6…
I pulled this list of six books on user research from a much larger list of recent books and articles compiled by a colleague in the research industry. These books offer valuable ideas for all types of market research because UX research has moved far away from just website usability. It now encompasses a broad…
An unfortunate consequence of NPS (Net Promoter Score) mania is that now zillions of surveys stalk us everywhere. Therefore, the likelihood of any particular survey being completed is extremely low. That might be okay if you are a large company with hundreds of thousands of customers to burn through with e-mail blasts. But if you…
Bad surveys bug me. Bad surveys touted in The New York Times bug me even more, as I expect only the best from them. Bad surveys on the front page of The New York Times with ridiculous and sensationalist findings bug me so much that they inspire blog posts. A front page article on July…
Two audience members at our LIMRA talk (see Public Studies: Advice for the PR Team and Advice for the Research Team) asked questions about biased research findings. Doesn’t starting with the research story and writing dream headlines lead you down a path of finding or confirming what your internal client wants to hear? I suppose…
Yesterday we were in Milwaukee at a film studio, shooting for a soon-to-be-released Versta Research video about making research matter. It explains how to design and execute research to ensure that it gets heard, understood, and put into action by your business partners. The video outlines three tips. Here’s the first: begin by writing dream…
If you ever have trouble separating all the hype of new methods and technology from the reality of whether those methods work, turn to the sober and decidedly non-hyped world of academic research. Some of the smartest people in the world build their careers by pursuing scientific research about research methods. They publish their results…
I recently came across this strange big book, the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, compiled by the Federal Judicial Center and the National Research Council. It’s not fun reading, but it provides an enormously useful and fascinating overview of what makes social and marketing research (and other kinds of scientific research, too) sufficiently rigorous to…
Every year I offer my top picks for summer intensive training courses on research methods, and usually I point to several universities for the sake of options and a full range of methods. Well, this year I am pointing to just one. I looked at the course listings at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research…