Brands are living entities. They rise and fall according to consumer interest in them, which is driven in part by marketing’s efforts to extend the life of the brand. This is where market research comes into play. Whether you are a brand manager for a multi-million dollar consumer brand or the owner...read more

Pricing is one of those tricky P’s that we speak of in marketing. Getting the right price can add serious coin to the company’s bottom line. Missing the mark could lead to lost sales, lower earnings and the proverbial albatross around the neck of being the “high” price player. So, can marketing...read more

Previously I spoke about the iceberg principle which states that only 10% of a problem’s true nature is visible to decision makers. It is the 90% that lies below the surface that offers market researchers the greatest opportunity to do good for our organizations.In order to reach a comprehensive...read more

Market research, and by association survey research in general, was not designed to be a random fishing trip. This is not to say that randomness isn’t important to our cause, but is not the key driver if you will. Yet, it seems as if so many projects occur at the whim of a CMO who may or may not...read more

In the voice of the customer world it is our role as market researchers to listen and follow through on what the customers are saying. Quite often this puts us in the position of ‘middle men’ between the customers and internal groups (e.g. sales, marketing, finance, customer service, etc.)...read more

“Welcome to the show!” so the ringmaster said. We could also say welcome to the survey, and that would be the function of the welcome page in the Cvent online survey platform. The platform allows the researcher to create not only an invitation, but also a welcome and a thank you page. How...read more

Just who we are is a question that has been asked by philosophers since time immemorial. Market research professionals are no different than those wise men from ancient Greece in this regard. Our task is to create an understanding of the consumer’s mind in which we can shape our brand positioning...read more

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

It is rare that as a marketing researcher I get to take a survey. That may sound odd, but more often than not one’s occupation is used as a screener. Most researchers don’t want other researchers taking their survey, even though they may be qualified on all other accounts. The rare occasion is the...read more

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