While we highlight the most popular posts from a given month in our newsletter, one of my favorite activities is to look back and see what posts were the most popular overall each year. Keeping with tradition, here's a look back across the 20 most popular posts of 2012!   Customer Loyalty Month: 25...read more

The key to success in market research is to ask the right questions. This sounds easy, however in reality it is not. There are numerous examples where projects have gone wrong because we sought answers to the wrong questions. In full disclosure this has happened to me on more than one occasion in my...read more

When we ask for customer feedback on a survey our focus is almost entirely on a specific product or service in question. Quite often it involves measuring customer satisfaction, brand awareness or some other variable directly impacting the 4Ps. However there seems to be a trend toward concluding...read more

As market researchers, we are frequently asked to assess the opinions of our constituents. In the process of questionnaire creation, this can take the place of asking one group directly about their sentiment, but there are other options. It is equally common to ask one group about their perceptions...read more

When is it appropriate to look outside your house files for potential respondents? I go outside for sample when my internal database does not have adequate coverage in a key response group or when an “outside in” view of the market is required. There are a few options marketing researchers can...read more

Like it or not, as researchers we are in the wordsmithing business. Either we are developing questionnaires to probe into constructs such as advertising awareness or customer satisfaction, or we are analyzing respondent comments for depth and tonality. At the end of the day we take these words and...read more

Another research blogger recently brought up the question: Does marketing research really matter? It was coupled with the age-old riddle about a falling tree in the forest and whether or not it makes a sound if no one is there to listen. As someone who has made a career out of marketing research I...read more

No matter what your flavor of research: market research, political or social polling, employee and human resource research, client satisfaction or some other variety it is best to strive for brevity. This is one of the most difficult challenges facing survey authors given the complex nature of...read more

Most sales people consider former clients as dead-end opportunities, assuming that they are angry or dissatisfied in some way and are happily doing business elsewhere. Yet it’s just as likely that the client bears no ill-will towards the sales person at all and simply has not been active for any...read more

Marketers and researchers have long battled the merits of telephone vs online surveys, both claiming to provide a more accurate sampling of the general population. With changing technology however, both sides are seeming to lose their argument for the most thorough sampling:• Landlines. In 2010, one...read more