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

Who Owns the Customer?

A study recently conducted by the CMO Council and SAS brought up an interesting question…Who owns the customer? The overall thrust of the study was to highlight the gaps and opportunities for CMOs to partner with their colleague in arms the CIO. In this day of ever increasing data it is critical for...read more

Ad Testing 101

There was a day not long ago that advertising testing involved sitting large numbers of people in a room and showing them ads embedded in pilot television shows with a pre-exposure survey and a post-test assessment following the programming and ad exposure. My how things have changed! With the...read more

Do Something Others Dont—Listen to Your Customers

I read a great article by Donna Fluss in CRM Magazine recently, Surveys Alone Are Not the Answer. What really hooked me was this statement: After years of analyzing exceptional service organizations, it's clear to me that the organizations that deliver great service do something that others...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

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

There is No One Ring: Segmentation Basics

Well the good news is that I am back on the podium instructing another session of Market Research 101. Teaching brings many joys for me, one in particular is that it challenges me to go back over my practices and check to see if they are indeed ‘best practices.’ In a recent class session we began a...read more

20 Most Popular Posts of 2012

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

It's All About The Words

It’s all about the words. In this case it’s the words we choose to describe a brand. Our colleagues in brand management and advertising are very keen on knowing which words consumers use when they are describing our brand relative to the competition. And what concerns brand managers and creative...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
The Rise of the Smart Phone: Are you Leverging Mobile? 10 Tips for Mobile-Friendly Survey Creation