Not all surveys will be applicable to all potential respondents. Targeting our survey efforts to those most likely to respond will increase our engagement levels and in theory provide a more interesting experience. How do we know who is most likely to respond? This is a question for the ages, but in...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

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

Measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction is a primary task for both consumer and B2B market research professionals. Today’s question is a matter of time as in a snapshot (one period in time) or a trend (measurements over a period of time.) Should satisfaction, awareness or other measures be...read more

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

If you ever watch the X-Factor, you know what Simon Cowell expects. He wants the performers to completely and utterly amaze the audience each and every time ‒ to go the extra mile. Sometimes this happens and sometimes the performers get ahead of themselves, put their best performances first and...read more

Optimism, or lack thereof, is a key driver to both current and future spending. Practitioners in both consumer and B2B market research have known this for some time. There are numerous ongoing tracking studies which measure consumer sentiment and/or sentiment amongst purchase managers. Both have...read more

Topics of the day (TOD) are often associated with public opinion polls, but can be useful those of us in consumer and B2B market research. One such topic of current importance is the Fiscal Cliff. There are numerous tax cuts expiring and spending cuts set to go into effect on January 1, 2014 unless...read more

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

There was a time when people were simply grateful you asked them for their opinion. Those times are not now! Unless you have a fervent fan or customer base odds are you will have to offer some form of incentive to encourage response. This tome is not about the merits of whether to incent or not, but...read more