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

Measuring Work Personalities

Survey research can be used to assess the attitudes and opinions of virtually any group or sub-group. Most of my work has been in the areas of consumer and B2B market research, but from time to time my focus has shifted toward surveying employees. This makes perfect sense as our employees are the...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

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

Charting a New Direction with Research

One the primary purposes of marketing research (both for consumer and B2B market research) is to mitigate risk. Often I am asked what I do for a living and invariably my response is I quantify executives gut feelings. This is exactly where market research as a function needs to be. When we bring our...read more

How representative is my sample?

The question that lies in the back of any researcher’s mind centers on what degree is their sample a reasonable measure of the population of interest? All aspects of the survey project can be spot on, but if the respondents do not form a representative sample then all bets are off for the quality of...read more

Keep it simple, but also make it fun!

There is no doubt that our job as market researchers has become easier due to the advent of online questionnaire design. The tools available to us now have also made it less challenging to create surveys that are engaging to the respondent which benefits the overall quality of the data we collect....read more

A Twist on the Mean

When it comes to metric data you have the ultimate flexibility in the analytical strategy you can employ. Examples of metric data include population, age, years of education, income, monthly sales, etc. Certain forms brand awareness and customer satisfaction measures can also be considered metric....read more

Adding customer feedback to the planning process

Building on a previous entry about exceeding market expectations, this post will look at a particular type of survey, the planning survey. If you are in B2B market research you are likely familiar with the requests of internal clients who need to budget and schedule for the coming year. The timing...read more
The Rise of the Smart Phone: Are you Leverging Mobile? 10 Tips for Mobile-Friendly Survey Creation