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

As consumer insight professionals we are often tasked with assessing how our consumers and prospects make a choice when selecting a product or service. This is not an easy task regardless of whether your focus is consumer or B2B market research, but there are several ways to reach the end. A recent...read more

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

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

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

When we create a scale to measure consumer attitudes, be it for consumer or B2B marketing research, we have a choice in how we create the scale. One of the first questions to ask ourselves is how many poles should be used? By poles I mean how we specify the end points for the scale. The two common...read more

How do we know what is important to our customers and those we wish to do business with? This is the $64,000 question. In survey research especially that which focuses on consumer or B2B marketing research this question becomes even more critical in these slow-growth economic times. This line of...read more

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...read more

Incentives for survey participation are de rigueur. All of the major panels offer some form of incentive to their panelists. Typically these are in the form of points for completing a survey. These points can then be tallied and exchanged for fascinating items like magazine subscriptions, gift...read more

At one point, not too long ago, marketing research involved the collection of quantitative survey data and in-depth opinions through qualitative focus groups and interviews. Oh, how that has changed! The second stream in this river of consumer insight came when data mining became economically...read more