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

The number of true monopolies in the global economy is not that large. What this means to the rest of us is that we have to compete to sell our products and services. Competition can come from both global competitors and those homegrown in your back yard.To grow in a soft economy companies must be...read more

The concept of a New York minute can be applied to market research. For those who do not know a New York minute is an instant, which is infinitely shorter than the 60-second minute you and I work with. In the current haze of cloud-based thinking, we can apply this short attention span metric via the...read more

If all goes well your respondent’s will complete the survey providing accurate data in the process. This is the goal anyway. How we engage participants from the point of the invitation through the survey and upon completion has an impact upon the quality and success of our overall project. Just as...read more

Even healthcare practitioners need to understand that choice exists in the market! This is why I strongly prescribe a healthcare satisfaction survey. This should be taken quarterly, at a minimum, for the full effects to be seen. Customer satisfaction measurement is well known in the consumer and B2B...read more

Do you sometimes feel like you’ve exhausted all ideas for increasing your customer base? Or like you’re reinventing the wheel over and over again with little return? What’s the secret to winning new customers in such a competitive marketplace? How do you stand out among the rest and continue to...read more

It is time to get out the cloak and dagger, hide in the shadows and observe what the other guy is doing. The world of competitive intelligence (CI) is a subset of market research that provides valuable insight into what your competitors are doing. This is not the world of corporate espionage, but...read more

"Don't let your marketing dollars go up in smoke!" Steve McKee has a vested interest in making sure companies are doing their research, and doing it right - he's the president of marketing firm McKee Wallwork Cleveland, author of When Growth Stalls: How It Happens, Why You’re Stuck and What To Do...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

“Does anyone remember laughter?” said one Robert Plant in the immortal song Stairway to Heaven. Does laughter (once described as the "best medicine") have a place in survey research? Some might argue we should follow the route of the dismal science, but I heartedly disagree.As a construct humor has...read more