Customer Insights

For more than 20 years Greg has delved into the world of marketing, analytics and strategy. His expertise lies in the space between the structured world of IT and the creative, customer-focused needs of marketing. His thought leadership has been honed by practical application in B2B, B2C and the public sector. Greg’s experience has been gained by working in both client-facing agency roles and positions within internal marketing departments for companies such as The Los Angeles Times, Guitar Center, Wilkin Guge Marketing, and currently with Global Knowledge as their in-house marketing research expert.

He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from California State University, San Bernardino. His professional affiliations include the American Marketing Association and Alpha Kappa Psi, Professional Business Fraternity. He lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina. Learn more about Greg on Google+

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Cvent or any other organization or individual.

How do you measure agreement? Measuring agreement is one of the most commonly employed practices in the realm of consumer and B2B market research. The questions at hand could be focused on agreement with a product concept, agreement with the main tenets in an advertisement, or to what degree a respondent agrees with personality statements, perhaps in the form of a Likert scale.

The example below illustrates a multiple response method where the participant selects any or all statements they feel...

Setting up a market test is by no means a difficult task, but it does require foresight and patience. In the direct or database marketing worlds, we might test offer, copy, medium (e.g. postcard vs. letter), subject lines, response rates and so forth. In online marketing research, several options are available for testing. Let’s take a look at a few…

Releasing an online survey is no different than any other direct marketing campaign. We are concerned with response rate, percent completing the...

In this time of political craziness, marketers involved in supporting candidates and causes greatly benefit from timely marketing research. Surveys and public opinion polls are flying around everywhere and are being quoted almost daily in the media. Top line numbers such as percent likely to vote for candidate X are useful, but the real meat lies beneath the top line.

Research can provide guidance into the mindset of customers, prospects, or voters as in this case. In most political...

There is a fine line between requiring respondents to answer a question thus avoiding missing data, and pushing them to a place where they decide to exit the survey before completion. As the survey author you have the ability to specify whether or not a question is ‘required’ or alternatively a respondent can skip the question and continue with the survey.

When a respondent skips a question they are qualified to answer this creates missing data. This causes further problems when you enter the...

Most of what marketing does involves persuasion. To elaborate, we are involved in the creation and dissemination of information that is designed to affect perceptions, attitudes and subsequently behaviors. Big money is spent every year in the design of communications, developing tradeshow booths, training customer service representatives to be responsive, public relations efforts and so forth.

So the question is: “What do your customers and prospects think of your communication efforts?”

This is a...

There comes a time when those of us in market research have a bad day and craft a questionnaire that misses the mark. This can come in the form of a poorly worded question or logic that skips respondents off into the universe. To help mitigate these moments place a sticky note beside your monitor that reminds you to ‘Always Check Logic!’

I came across one of those surveys today. The error in question has to do establishing a ‘required’ response. In a separate post this topic is covered in detail....

Continuing on with question types and their relationship to the data generated let’s take a peak at the allocation problem. Asking respondents to illustrate how they allocate time and/or resources is a common process in both consumer and B2B marketing research. We may have interest in how customers allocate their weekly grocery budget, how companies allocate their employee headcount across departments, or advertising and marketing budgets distributed across media.

There are specific question...

Goal setting and strategies for achieving them is an industry unto itself. Marketers, in general, and marketing researchers specifically, need to embrace goal setting before launching into any campaign. Prior to launching a survey project we need to gain clarity about the types of questions the data will be expected to answer. This means developing a sense of precision, akin to German manufacturing, about our information needs and the types of decisions our internal or external clients will need...

Not all juries are held in court rooms. In this case I am referring to a jury of executive opinion. In many situations empirical data does not exist to guide the efforts of market research. What does exist to fill in the gaps in this situation is the intuition and experience of corporate executives and subject matter experts.

For example suppose your role as an industry market research professional is to create a composite index of economic, demographic and competitive data for countries your...