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

Managing your database is a lot like the TV show Survivor. Chances are, you have a pretty large database, with active and inactive subscribers (castaways) – and not everyone can stay. You and your team (the tribal council) need to find a way to clean house on your database in order to make it more...read more

Choose your words wisely or so we have always been told. We could extend this thought to the market research world by saying choose your categories wisely. The categories we use in our questions directly impacts the quality of our survey data analysis.Nowhere is this more of an issue than in the...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

How much longer do I have to go to complete this thing? As someone who is actively involved in online survey creation, not to mention someone who enjoys taking surveys, I am greatly concerned about survey length and how we convey that length to our participants. One of the more common ways of...read more

As market researchers, we are frequently asked to assess the opinions of our constituents. In the process of questionnaire creation, this can take the place of asking one group directly about their sentiment, but there are other options. It is equally common to ask one group about their perceptions...read more

Measuring influence is a common practice in both consumer and B2B marketing research. Understanding the dynamics of the purchase process is critical to both effective messaging as well as the overall design of your sales programs. With that said from the perspective of questionnaire creation there...read more

Advances in online survey design and market research in general have allowed us to expand outside the realm of just asking the right questions. In order to ensure participant engagement, and ultimately higher completion rates, we have to consider the question formats we use in addition to how they...read more

There is a fine line between requiring respondents to answer a question thus avoiding missing data, and pushing them to a place where they decide to exit the survey before completion. As the survey author you have the ability to specify whether or not a question is ‘required’ or alternatively a...read more

Most of what marketing does involves persuasion. To elaborate, we are involved in the creation and dissemination of information that is designed to affect perceptions, attitudes and subsequently behaviors. Big money is spent every year in the design of communications, developing tradeshow booths,...read more