Reaching Consensus

As a fact of daily life we are confronted with choices and options. Some of these decisions are easy to make and take little of our precious time. However, there are those decisions that take considerable time and resources to resolve. As survey researchers we put our respondents through choice...read more

Course Correcting the Direction for MR

There comes a time when all professions begin to question their purpose. Consider it therapy for the profession. Market research is no different. Since the new millennium started, the MR profession has seen the rise of data mining, social media, online survey platforms, big data, gamification, The...read more

Do We Agree?

Ok so just what is a Likert scale anyway? If you have been in market research, or any form of survey research, for any length of time you have no doubt come across the ubiquitous Likert scale and its strongly agree to strongly disagree framework. In the years I have been involved in constructing...read more

Crafting Community Surveys

What makes a community? Well certainly it is a collection of unique individuals who call a single place home. It is also a place where businesses hang their shingle. Collectively the residents and businesses work together and if all goes well the community can thrive. However, there is something...read more

Know Thy Competition!

The number of true monopolies in the global economy is not that large. What this means to the rest of us is that we have to compete to sell our products and services. Competition can come from both global competitors and those homegrown in your back yard.To grow in a soft economy companies must be...read more

Survey and Research Incentives 101

Incentives are de rigueur in survey research. For some reason respondents are just not willing to take all of the surveys they are invited to. I cannot understand why. Sarcasm aside, the amount of time available to respondents is becoming increasingly scarce. In order to compensate for this trend,...read more

Tasty Satisfaction Treats: Feedback Tips for Restaurateurs

If there were one industry that could truly benefit from consumer insight research, it is the restaurant industry. Granted there are the giants of the industry, e.g. McDonalds or Chik-fil-A, that have teams dedicated to dissecting every aspect of the customer experience, but the biggest gains can...read more

Hey You! Feeling a Bit Irrelevant?

Is market research becoming irrelevant? If you follow the published works of Forrester Research then you may be tempted to believe that we should scrap our career path and pursue something different. Don’t be tempted! What Forrester brings to light in their article What needs to happen in market...read more

A new twist on the one percent concept

There is another side to the ‘one percent’ debate. This presented itself in fine fashion recently thanks to two emails from LinkedIn. In the past year the business networking site surpassed 200 million profiles. In 2012, I received an initial email stating that I was one of the first one percent of...read more

The New Officer In Town: The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer

There is a new C-level position taking shape. According to work published in the Harvard Business Review blog the next generation of C-level executive is likely to be the Chief Customer Officer (CCO). This is a good thing for those of us in marketing research and consumer insight positions as it...read more
The Rise of the Smart Phone: Are you Leverging Mobile? 10 Tips for Mobile-Friendly Survey Creation