As of this writing, Versta is one of 67 prominent survey and polling organizations currently supporting the initiative. The initiative is designed to create protocols and recognition for regular disclosure of methods when survey organizations conduct public polls.

Trust in survey research and public polls is critical not only for the public good, but for the important work that we do for our clients.  Our clients rely on us to give them accurate data and truthful assessments. They can’t make good decisions without that. And they rely on us to ensure that when they share data with the public, it is backed by the most rigorous and defensible methods available in the social sciences. Transparency is one means of ensuring that all organizations are continually held to the highest standards of rigor and accuracy.

AAPOR began the initiative in 2009 “to encourage routine disclosure of methodological information from polls and surveys whose findings are released to the public.” The organization lists the following as key elements of the efforts now underway:

• The association’s public recognition of excellence in transparency;
• A system for collecting and archiving disclosure information;
• Education for organizations in how to make transparency a routine part of their work;
• Outreach to survey sponsors, users of survey data and the public to reinforce the value of transparency and to publicize the organizations that participate in the initiative;
• Collaboration with other associations and academic disciplines in these activities.

One benefit of working with an organization like Versta Research is that you can fully trust the outcomes of the research, and you can trust that we have the expertise to defend it.  You can also trust that we work diligently within the industry to protect the value of our collective investments in good research.

—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

There are three tiers of survey research common in public relations, only two of which can truly optimize your PR:

Serious Surveys.  Beyond providing rich material for news releases, serious surveys are designed to establish true thought leadership.  They are leveraged for publication through white papers, conference presentations, or peer-reviewed journals.  The surveys we conducted and published about ulcerative colitis are excellent examples, and for the last three years have been used by the client to demonstrate a deep understanding of the issues faced by patients and physicians.

Solid Surveys. Solid surveys answer interesting questions or document issues that people care about, with solutions that people can use.  The primary goal is media placement, but a solid survey can be leveraged further.  For example, one client we worked for got significant story placements by surveying people about skin cancer myths and reasons for not taking simple precautions like wearing sunscreen.  Another gets ongoing coverage for a survey of IT professionals about future trends in the marketplace.

Silly Surveys. These are unfortunately not designed to answer authentic questions, but to grab attention in ways that may not even be relevant to your business.  We saw one survey not long ago that measured which song titles, from among five or six listed, captured people’s optimism or pessimism about the decade ahead.  The client?  An office products company.  Another recent survey announced the percentage of women who would give up TV, cell phones, computers, or sex in exchange for losing 10 pounds.  Who cares?  These are not meaningful comparisons; they’re just silly.

To be fair, silly surveys can attract good media, but there are costs.  First, they diminish your (and our) long-term credibility as journalists start to ask whether they’re reading yet another gimmick survey or whether your latest effort offers something of real value.  Second, there is an opportunity cost.  You could be investing in information that not only gets media attention, but is leveraged in multiple ways and for many years.  We have a client from whom we did a solid survey back in 2004, which they are still using on their website to engage consumers in 2010.

If you’re in the business of PR, we suggest leaving the silly surveys to Facebook polls.  Instead, focus on building a credible foundation with expert research and data analysis.  Versta Research can help you with this.  We can help you answer questions with expertise, turn data into stories, and ultimately help you  communicate those stories to the audiences you need to reach.

—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

For those of us at Versta Research, he is well known for his focus on understanding versus research:

“Basically, I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been,” he said. “I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has done it.”  (From an interview cited in the New York Times)

Why are we inspired by this?  Because even though we are interested in doing research, we do it for one reason:  To understand things.  In fact, we named our company from the social science concept (and German word) “verstehen” which means to understand.

Fundamentally, we define our work not by proprietary methods, or the specific tools that we use or develop, or the statistical procedures we implement.  We define it by our interest in and approach to understanding.  And that, of course, means using, learning, developing, and inventing whatever tools, processes, data collection techniques, and analysis that will get good answers.  In short, to achieve understanding, we do research.

Understanding is the outcome.  That’s what we really care about (and what you really care about) and what motivates our work.  Research is the means to that end.

If you have not done so, take a look at the homepage of our website.  It’s all about understanding.  We are committed to helping you understand:

• Your clients
• Your prospects
• The public
• Consumers
• Your competition
• Your customers
• Your data
• Your products
• Your image
• The world

If and when research can help you understand, we are here to help.

—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

How do you bring the two together?  In our view, you bring them together by investing in people who are trained in both methods and who have deep experience in both.  The newsletter article outlines:

• Why it is best to be fluent in both
• The strengths and promises of each method
• The qualities and training needed to excel at both
• The false promise of technology
• Practical ideas for incorporating the strengths of each into a research effort

Ultimately, research is all about asking questions, finding information and data, thinking about it, probing deeper, assimilating and synthesizing it, and then turning data into stories so that the research gets heard and understood.  Whether you use qualitative or quantitative methods, your data needs to tell a compelling human (business) story, and the best stories draw upon both.

Give us a call, and we would be happy to share with you examples and stories of our work that have successfully bridged the gap.  In the meantime, take a look at our June 2010 Newsletter for a deeper understanding of our approach, and what you can expect from our people.

—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

The importance of the first was highlighted in Sunday’s “Corner Office” interview in the New York Times business section.  Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of the Alltop news aggregation site, noted the importance of brief and pithy reports:

Q. What should business schools teach more of, or less of?

A. They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off.

Q. Why?

A. Because no one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with 60 PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting.  What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, “I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.”

However, the importance of complexity was highlighted the next day in an article about Edward Tufte, a contemporary champion of presenting rich data via simple and compelling graphics.  Over-simplification can lead to bad decisions:

Mr. Tufte devotes a section of one of his books to explaining how clearer graphics could have persuaded NASA officials to postpone the takeoff [that resulted in the space shuttle Challenger disaster] because of cold weather. One of his conclusions is that presentations before the explosion, and even after, were too simplified. For simplicity, information was left out about the many missions during warmer weather that were uneventful. But the absence of that information meant that it was easy to overlook the larger pattern, that cold weather was dangerous to the O-ring.

In an interview, Mr. Tufte emphasized the need to enlist “the clarity of intense information.”

That’s the thing about transparency: you know it when you don’t see it. It some cases, it can mean more information. But other times, the reader can be overwhelmed by too much irrelevant information or, in one of Mr. Tufte’s favorite terms, “chartjunk.”

The goal in writing and presenting research should be to keep it brief and concise, but at the same time, communicate “intense” and relevant information.  A clear story will do this for you because good research stories are laden with meaning, complexity, and nuance, but they can be communicated succinctly, clearly, and with unambiguous implications.  Need help?  Versta Research specializes in rigorous research and communicating intense information (without all the chartjunk) to internal and external audiences.  We help you turn data into stories, and would be pleased to assist on your next research project.

—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

Here are some great quotes we found to keep in mind as guiding principles:

A prudent question is one half of wisdom—Francis Bacon, 17^th century philosopher and scientist

If you do not ask the right questions, you do not get the right answers—Edward Hodnett, 20^th century poet and writer

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions—Sir Antony Jay, contemporary writer

Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers—Anthony Robbins, contemporary self-help author and motivational speaker

As noted in the newsletter, one of the best ways to truly add value to the research that you do is to listen carefully to your internal clients and formulate the right questions.  Research is all about answering questions, which is, of course, all about asking questions.  Building fancy statistical models is fun and brainy and definitely worth bragging about at your next party, but few people in your organization care much about models.  They care about what answers those statistics provide to the fundamental business questions that keep them up at night.

Any questions? Give us a call. Struggling to find your questions? Take a look at our March 2010 Newsletter.  We are happy to help you find them.

—Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

Not only will this shift from product marketing to customer marketing enhance the ability of businesses to deliver value to their customers and shareholders, but it will likely help market researchers bring higher levels of value to the work they do for their clients.  Why?  Because market research is fundamentally about people.  We are trained as social scientists, and have expertise in understanding peoples’ needs, aspirations, and pain points.  We help businesses understand the opportunities to help people, and of course, to sell to them.

In contrast, a product-centric approach to marketing forces an uncomfortable relationship with market research because the business is overly focused on products.  Researchers interview people to get data, but they spend a great deal of time measuring and tracking information about products rather than customers, focusing on brand attributes, perceptions of products, awareness and usage of one service over another, and so on.  Have you ever filled out a survey (or designed one!) and wondered why most questions are not really about customers and what they need?  Instead surveys are often focused on satisfaction with brands, words that convey the personalities of brands, preferences for one brand over another, and so on.

The HBR authors suggest that brand managers and product managers will be replaced in the future by customer managers, and that customer managers will look a lot like the types of people currently in market research.  To quote the authors:

We’d expect the most effective customer managers to have broad training in the social sciences—psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics—in addition to an understanding of marketing. They’d approach the customer as behavioral scientists rather than as marketing specialists, observing and collecting information about them, interacting with and learning from them, and synthesizing and disseminating what they learned. For business schools to stay relevant in training customer managers, the curriculum needs to shift its emphasis from marketing products to cultivating customers.

With our deep training in social science and expertise in understanding people, Versta Research can help you make the transition to a truly customer oriented approach to doing business.  Give us a call at (312) 348-6089; we would be happy to share our thoughts and perspectives on some of the specific problems you are facing, and we would be happy to share with you a copy of the HBR article as well.

Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

What do we know about the kinds of stories and research reports that can achieve this?  A recent study reported in The New York Times provides some clues.  Researchers looked at which types of NYT articles get e-mailed by readers the most.  One surprising result was that science articles (stories that convey research findings!) get e-mailed the most.  The reason is not that readers like science more than other topics – it’s that science articles, at least those in The New York Times, have content characteristics that people find compelling and want to share.   The researchers analyzed thousands of articles (both science and non-science) and noted the characteristics of those most likely to go viral.  They tend to be articles that:

• Elicit strong emotions
• Have positive themes rather than negative themes
• Inspire awe, or a sense of discovery and grandeur beyond oneself
• Challenge the reader intellectually
• Are surprising in some way

When it comes to market research, this does not mean that all your research presentations need to be awe-inspiring and emotional calls to action.  But it does mean that your research should tell a story that relates to people and what they do, feel, and care about.  It should show them opportunities as well as barriers.  It should provide context.  The numbers do not need to be easy, but remember they help tell the story rather than being the story.  If you’re writing a story for media placement and would love to see your story leveraged beyond the initial hit, incorporate as many of these characteristics as you can.

A lot of surveys and market research reports today sit buried in PowerPoint charts that nobody has bothered to read – a sorry state of affairs that inspires Versta’s mission to help you turn data into stories.  With the right approach, your managers and audiences will not only listen to your findings and act on them, but they will be eager to share them with their managers and their friends and family as well.

Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

1. Data visualization and graphics will become more important.  The technology for amazing visualization tools is almost there, along with a growing realization that presenting data needs to be far more intuitive.
2. The value-add of insight and interpretation will become essential, not optional.  With new technologies, any monkey can now collect data, and half those monkeys can dump it into a tool that makes a chart.  But what does it all mean?  What’s the story?
3. Focus groups will become a thing of the past, in favor of qualitative ethnography and MROCs (Market Research Online Communities).  Usually focus groups are not the ideal way to answer the questions that clients have, but clients value hearing and seeing their customers.  New technologies have made better methods more accessible.
4. Data integration from multiple sources and areas within an organization will become a new imperative.  There are lots of data in lots of places.  One huge challenge over the next decade will be to bring multiple (and multiplying) sources of data together, connect the dots, and create intelligence.
5. Intellectual expertise to sort through, integrate, and interpret the explosion of data will become key.

Versta Research will be staying ahead of these trends over the next ten years to ensure that you get comprehensive, focused, and deep knowledge of your markets.  We offer help from high level experts who have rigorous training and who have the ability transform your data into stories that you can use.

-Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

Looking back, here are what we consider to be the five biggest changes that shaped current challenges faced by market research and opinion polling:

1. Online data collection using sample panels became the dominant mode of surveying, displacing a huge industry in telephone surveying.  Plus there has been a dramatic decline in households owning landlines, which makes the ideal of probability sampling extremely difficult to achieve.
2. Survey technology made data collection easy and cheap which means that a lot of market research became a commodity, resulting in industry consolidation and need to find new ways of adding value.
3. An explosion of too many surveys, which are everywhere, powered by simple tools like Survey Monkey.  Along with this there has been a dramatic decline in response rates, bringing the issue of quality to the fore like never before.
4. Statistical and mathematical expertise grew in demand.  There is so much data and information, and it is so easy to get.  But who knows what to do with it all?
5. “Audience-ready” reports became more valuable.  Newspapers laid off staff and market research departments downsized, demanding a level of professional involvement to ensure that research reports are easy to read, interpret, and ready to deliver to the audiences who need them most.

One product of these five trends is Versta Research’s focus on high-level expertise and academic brainpower so that you get smart, creative, and flexible market research.  Another is the skill and commitment we have in helping you communicate research to managers, clients, reporters, and the audiences you need to reach.

In our next post we’ll highlight what we predict will be the five biggest trends that will shape market research challenges in the decade to come.

–Joe Hopper, Ph.D.