TRC

A recent discussionon Linkedin pondered whether MR is having its own global warming crisis in the form of an ever dwindling respondent pool. As always, this brought on arguments that response rates need to be improved, quality enforced and of course talk about how much we have slipped as an industry since the good old days. Some blame clients for this (they demand speed and lower cost without concern for quality!) and some blame researchers for not holding clients’ feet to the fire.   It struck me that this is yet another case of researchers not viewing things from a client perspective.

Tags: Market Research Methodologies, Market Research, Market Research Innovation

Well, another conference is over, perhaps our best ever. A great roster of speakers, a room full of engaged attendees and a great location was a terrific formula for a memorable conference. Some highlights from the various sessions:

Lenny Murphy, Editor-in-Chief of the Greenbook blog opened with a wide sweep discussing the waves of changes rocking the market research world. Pulling from the GRIT survey, his discussion with emerging and established players, as well as his itinerant investigation, he was able to convincingly make the case that change in the MR industry is happening. Now. He talked about emerging technologies such as mobile, social media and text analytics and how academic expertise was a key to unlocking a future of new ideas. It was a perfect set-up for the group of academic presentations that were to follow.

Tags: Market Research, Market Research Innovation, Conferences, Behavioral Economics, Neuroscience

In his opus Thinking, Fast & Slow, Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman (click here for previous post) relates a story from early in his career when he was leading a team to develop a curriculum and write a textbook on judgment and decision-making in high schools. He had assembled a group of experts and after working diligently for a year they had completed an outline of the syllabus and written two chapters. One fine day when discussing procedures for estimating uncertain quantities, it occurred to him that he should get an estimate from everyone on how long he thought this whole project would take. Being the clever psychologist that he was, rather than ask the group to guess publicly, he asked each person to make a confidential prediction. The mean was about two years and the range was about half a year on either side. In other words, the group was very consistent in its prediction.  

Tags: Psychology, Daniel Kahneman, Behavioral Economics, Market Research, Consumer Behavior

Gamification as a means to understand consumer choice is a relatively new idea for research (and controversial in many circles), but it is not new everywhere. For example, one sociologist, Dmitri Williams, has been studying economic behavior using gamfication for four years. His experiments were based on the online fantasy game EverQuest II, which involves thousands of players selling millions of virtual items every month. In essence it is a fantasy economy that works like a real economy.  

Professor Williams theorized that this provided an opportunity to observe the choices players made without fear of the Hawthorne effect (some people give different answers when they know they are being watched).   It also allowed him to set up test and control groups and observe what happens when, to take a simple example, prices go up (if you guessed “people buy less” you win) and to look at gender roles. He saw applications in many fields, not the least of which being testing the impact of various government intervention options before implementing them in the real world.

Tags: Engaging Research, Gamification, Market Research

On a trip to Las Vegas in November 2011 I was twice presented with an option to move to the head of the line – for a price. I could take advantage of “early check-in” by paying $25. And I could get my buffet breakfast right away without waiting in line, again for a small fee. The buffet sign struck me as peculiar, since the 4 people ahead of me didn’t really constitute much of a “line”. I snapped a photo.

The concept of express fees is nothing new – Universal Florida, for example, has offered its Express^SM Plus Pass for years, affording visitors to skip the regular lines, and as a result experience more attractions during their visit. But the express fee is spreading beyond the domain of the theme park.  You can even pay to bypass the long security lines at the airport now, if you’re so inclined.

This got me thinking...who’s in such a rush?  And, even more important, who’s willing to fork over some cash so they won’t waste any more time waiting? We put that question to the test with a small web survey among members of TRC’s online panel.

Among the general population of adults, paying for speedy service is a somewhat polarizing notion. While about half of our survey takers are neutral on the concept, 1/3 are pro and 1/5 are anti. We asked about specific situations as well. Paying for early hotel check-in has nearly twice as many fans (23%) as paying for premium seating at a movie (12%) or paying to jump the line at a warehouse store (13%).

Tags: Consumer Behavior, Market Research

A former colleague of mine used to tell us to “torture the data until it confessed”. In other words, don’t just stop your investigation at the first finding. But rather, keep poking, prodding, flipping and coercing until you feel you’ve uncovered all the data has to give. Ah…images of Jack Bauer doing his thing flash through my mind just thinking about our own data “torture” sessions.

All kidding aside, what my colleague was really trying to say was spot on. I’m sure we’ve all known researchers who habitually stop at the first find. They rarely take the time to consider different ways of looking at data, of considering the message within.

Tags: segmentation, Market Research, Choice

The Nobel Prize winner and the intellectual godfather of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, has summarized a lifetime of research in his recent book Thinking, Fast & Slow. In the next few blog posts I will be drawing upon some concepts that he espouses and link them up to research to see what practitioners can take away from his four decades of work.

This post goes directly to the title of the work; fast and slow thinking. This is the foundation of his work. He and his great collaborator Amos Tversky, (who passed away and therefore could not receive the Nobel) see human thinking in two forms that they call System 1 and System 2. More aptly they could be called “automatic” and “effortful” systems, but Fast and Slow is a good shorthand description. According to Kahneman’s description,

“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control”

“System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations”

Tags: Market Research, Consumer Behavior, Psychology, Behavioral Economics

3D is all the rage in Hollywood and is coming to a TV set near you if it isn't there already. 3D@Home Consortium lists no fewer than 20 movies planned for theatrical release in 2012 that will be offered up in 3D. These include Men in Black 3, Star Trek 2 and The Ring 3D.

But is Hollywood's push toward 3D the result of consumer demand? Holly McKay reporting for FoxNews.com says that less than 50% of the box office earnings for Kung Fu Panda 2, Pirates of the Caribbean, Green Lantern and Cars 2 in 2011 were from 3D showings.

But how does 3D fit in as a draw relative to the other decisions a potential movie-goer makes? Does 3D motivate an American adult to select a movie to see on a given day?

Apparently not.

Tags: Measuring Importance, New Product Development, Market Research Innovation, Market Research

For the past few years MR blog posts have been dominated by posts questioning the future of Market Research or talking about just how tough it is to be a researcher in the new millennium. A recent discussion on Linkedin about the threat from DIY is a good example. If you read my blog frequently you know that I see the industry evolving, not going extinct. In any case, at TRC we do a great deal of research about Health Insurance and so I know that as challenging as research is, it is nothing compared to what the health insurance industry is going through.

First off, I'll ignore issues that have been with the industry for decades. More often than not they don't sell to the folks who use their products (most insurance comes through employers) and they often don't sell to the folks who pay the bills (a majority of insurance is sold through independent brokers). While some research clients don't expose us to their internal clients, we are nowhere near as separated from the folks who use our work as health insurance firms are.

Tags: Market Research, Brand

The Black Swan is a book that was published a few years ago and generated much publicity and at least some controversy. It occurred to me that there are lessons market researchers can learn from that book, particularly about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative data obtained from a survey format. The idea is that the framework used to analyze such data is different from that used for directly obtained qualitative data through methods such as IDIs and focus groups. Understanding the difference between quantitative and qualitative frameworks for data analysis (and in particular, the difference between statistical and managerial outliers) can help derive more value when the qualitative data are collected in a regular survey. But first, let's take a detour.

A Brief Tour of The Black Swan

In his informative (and entertaining) book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that real data are either distributed normally (from "mediocristan") or not (from "extremistan"). The former are characterized by data that follow the traditional normal distribution (or bell curve). The majority of the distribution is near the middle surrounding the average and as we venture further out the number of observations becomes increasingly scarce. It is a distribution that defines many phenomena in the natural world. In fact, basic statistics shows that with a reasonable number of observations most distributions start approximating the normal.

Tags: Quantitative, Qualitative, Market Research

Market researchers are fighting each day for a seat at the decision-making table. More and more "research professionals" are being bypassed by smart people with access to good tools, a hotly-debated topic within our community and perhaps a harbinger of what's to come in terms of when and how client- and vendor-side researchers get to contribute advice and ideas.

And yet too many researchers believe the value of market research is self-evident, and that the challenge facing our industry is really more of an obstacle caused by "everyone else." I see this train of thought emerge frequently on Twitter, or within any number of blogs and MRX-related posts.  It typically gets expressed along these lines:

Netflix screwed up. McDonald's screwed up. Coca-Cola screwed up (multiple times). If only they had done research!  A (name any large dollar amount) disaster that could have been averted with a $100,000 investment in listening to the customer. Silly companies.

Folks, it's hard to get better without humility.

Tags: Market Research

This month here in the States we will be celebrating our biggest secular holiday, Thanksgiving.   Traditionally, the holiday is thought to have started when early settlers to the "new" world, the Pilgrims, sat down to have a meal to celebrate the harvest with the Native American's who had befriended them. As we begin to close out 2011 in an industry facing an uncertain future, I was struck by the similarities between those early settlers and market researchers today.

On the surface the story of adventurers seeking a better life is a bit different than the story of boring market researchers seeking to survive, but I disagree.

Tags: Social Media, Market Research

Later this month, those of us in the United States celebrate one of my favorite holidays, Thanksgiving. Officially, Thanksgiving is a post-harvest celebration that was brought to the Americas by European settlers in the 16^th or 17^th century (depending on which historian you believe). Unofficially, it's the day where families and friends gather to feast, take naps and watch football. Oh my, even as I type this my mouth is watering...turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, peas and the like, with chasers of pumpkin, apple and other assorted pies. All delicious, but I particularly love eating turkey on Thanksgiving.

Tags: Market Research, segmentation

Sometimes it seems like the future of quantitiative mobile research has already been determined.

At a time when clients, budgets and timelines are demanding that we do more with less, mobile quant would seem to do a pretty good job with the "less" part of things. If we're being honest that makes us primary researchers a little nervous, and prone to think of mobile as an interesting but ultimately niche methodology.

 

The change is a comin'

But I'd wager that the current definition of "short" and "simple" will change over time as more consumers come to live fully mobile lives, and mobile devices become an increasingly "best" way to reach people for feedback. Conventional wisdom says ask only 5 to 10 questions and use the simplest of instructions, but how can that be the end of the story when people - right now - are browsing, shopping, and buying on their Smartphones?

Tags: Mobile Research, Surveys, Market Research

I recently came back from the 2011 The Market Research Event (TMRE) conference in Orlando, the biggest marketing research conference of the year. There was plenty to like, not the least of which was the scale of the event. Rarely, if ever, do we get to see an exclusively market research event that is so big. Kudos to IIR for putting it together.

The highlight of the event for me was the Keynotes, of which there were eight. I couldn't catch all of them, but my favorite was Sheena Iyengar from Columbia, author of the best seller The Art of Choosing (and sister-in-law of my friend Raghu Iyengar from Wharton). In a beautifully choreographed and clear presentation, Sheena (who is blind) talked about the problem of plenty in consumer choice and ways to avoid it for both sellers and buyers. The Keynotes were all held in a massive room and very entertainingly emceed by Cayne Collier, an actor and improv artist from Second City Chicago. Discussions with a variety of people indicated that the Keynotes were the favorite part of the conference for many.

Tags: Market Research

As I sat down to write I realized that this is not a simple question. Consider the conventional meaning of necessities (defined as must-haves) and luxuries (defined as nice-to-haves). Which category market research falls into may depend on the eye of the beholder.

Researchers (or more accurately research sellers) may want to think of themselves as producing necessities rather than luxuries. But in the consumer world necessities are also generally commodities and often sold based on price. Researchers of course want to be seen as producing something valuable, something that is worth a premium -- in other words, a luxury.  So, which is it?

Now let's look at it from a research buyer's perspective. The buyer may think of research as a necessity, something that is indispensible for making good business decisions. But in keeping with the popular perception of necessities, perhaps they feel that more than one company can provide it and are hence unwilling to pay much of a premium for it. This view would support the many research sellers who complain about the commoditization of research.

Tags: Market Research, necessity, economy, Luxury

I was watching the final round of the Bridgestone Invitational and my 14 year old son came in to the room.  I told him the established narrative. After a difficult two years Tiger Woods had returned to golf, but not before firing his long time and very loyal caddie.   Most saw this as just plain nasty on Tiger's part.  

I then told him how another golfer, Adam Scott, hired the caddie and was now on the verge of winning the tournament. I summed it up by saying that justice had prevailed.

He didn't even miss a beat before asking me, "Did Adam Scott fire his caddie so that he could hire the caddie Tiger fired?"

I don't follow competitive golf closely enough to know the answer. Worse, I had not even considered that the narrative "Tiger mean/Adam good" might be a bit off.  

A good lesson for any analyst to learn.

Tags: Market Research, misleading statistics, Insights

Quick. What kinds of data are needed for a successful segmentation?

Well, most clients I talk to about segmentation excitedly lead with the data they already have..."we have a TON of data...yes, yes, we can get it all...what's the rule for what data are good for segmentation and which aren't?...how do we tie it all together?...we really do have a lot, (sheepishly) do we really need it all?".  This focus on their data issue is quite understandable. Companies have spent a lot of time, money and resources getting their data house in order, and darn it they need to leverage it somehow. While, in fact, there really is a lot of valuable information in the data that many companies already have, it isn't always enough. In fact, I would argue that in some instances it only provides half the answer.

Tags: Consumer Behavior, segmentation, Market Research

The recent New MR Virtual Festival on presenting data had a number of really useful and interesting presentations. Mike Sherman’s presentation, “Less is More: Getting Value (Not Just Reams of Data) From Your Research” led to an interesting exchange that I think highlights the change in thinking that Market Research must make.

Mike reiterated the point that many have been making…we need to focus our reporting on the key things we learned and not waste executives’ time with a lot of superfluous information. In addition, the report should not just summarize the data, but rather it should synthesize it. He gave an example of a data set with these facts:

 

• · Jim broke his knee

• · A burglar broke Jim’s car window

• · Jim got a speeding ticket.

A summary of these data might be “Jim’s knee and car window were damaged and he got a speeding ticket”.

A synthesis of that data would be “Jim has been living dangerously”.

Tags: Market Research, misleading statistics, Science, Insights

I really enjoyed my time last week at Merlien’s Market Research in the Mobile World 2011 – a great place to meet and exchange ideas with the people and companies working to make effective mobile research a reality. We discussed the nitty-gritty of mobile survey applications, and the big picture of mobile adoption around the world. Taking it all in it’s hard to argue that mobile won’t play a major role in the future of the market research industry, both in the developed and developing worlds.

Here’s the thing, though. Most of the conversation during the conference focused on the “what” of mobile research – how to reach people, or whether or not to keep surveys short(er). Very little was said about the “so what,” even though that’s where we as research professionals can earn respect and remain relevant.

Tags: Market Research