Qualitative Research
10/6/08
Professional survey respondents
We get a lot of inquiries about how to join our panel or participate in our focus groups, and consequently we spend a lot of time explaining that we don’t maintain this kind of recruiting list for participants. (We custom recruit for almost all our groups. We’ll explain why below.) Some questions come from people […]
By David KennedyRead More
9/26/08
Customer service and the little things
This is the second in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa. To see our initial post, click here. One thing that’s nice about traveling is being out with the public. As researchers, we’re natural peoplewatchers, and this helps us with research designs when we’re back at our desks. Our first interesting […]
By Kevin RainesRead More
8/20/08
Reliability of Google Trends
I recently wrote a post on Google’s new service, Google Insights, which is an evolution of Google Trends. As a result of that post, I ran across this post discussing if Google Trends is reliable. One of the examples used compared the term “market research” to “advertising” and showed that both terms declined (as a […]
By David KennedyRead More
8/15/08
Cloudwatching
Tag clouds are, at this point in the history of the web, a well known and widely used method of classifying and displying the content of a website. There are free services to help you design your own clouds (the picture below was designed in wordle). Some of the resulting clouds are quite artistic. The […]
By Geoff UrlandRead More
8/11/08
More defective research…from the inside
You probably have noticed that we’re pretty passionate about discussing good and less-than-good practices in market research on our blog (if you haven’t, check out here, here, here, here, and here). I was reading the book Why Smart Companies Do Dumb Things the other day and one of the things the author mentioned as a […]
By David KennedyRead More
6/30/08
Market research for the individual
Ran across this site today, thanks to a Google alert. FaceStat – which allows you to rate (and be rated on) attractiveness, occupation, political leanings, and several other characteristics of random individuals who post their picture – seems to be one more twist in social networking sites that bills itself as “market research for the […]
By David KennedyRead More
6/6/08
Guess we won’t be getting a call from Apple
Steve Jobs was recently quoted in Fortune’s America’s Most Admired Companies, as saying, “We do no market research.We don’t hire consultants.” Guess that explains why they haven’t called. I know that innovation often means going out on a limb—revolutionary products don’t come from asking consumers what they want next—but some basic research can prevent costly […]
By David KennedyRead More
5/28/08
Sugging and Frugging
A comment on yesterday’s post brought up how telemarketers have impacted the credibility of market research. Being able to conduct valid research is our life blood and if we were ever unable to get people to participate in our research, we would be unable to provide accurate results to our clients – at least in […]
By David KennedyRead More
5/27/08
Ford’s swap your ride “research”
Ford’s recent commercial depicts real people test driving Fords under the premise of “market research.” Does this have an impact on our industry?Does it discredit true research?Will people be suspicious the next time they’re invited to participate in research (especially for an automaker)? I personally think the effect will be short lived as the ad […]
By David KennedyRead More
5/23/08
Shift Happens
While this video has been making the rounds for a while, I recently ran across it again.Clean presentation, gets to the point and it’s more motivating than daunting.That’s one of the reasons I like research – here are the questions, so now what are the answers? Occasionally, we get to provide some of those answers.We […]
By David KennedyRead More