In this month’s ESOMAR Research World magazine David Stark, GfK’s VP of Integrity, compliance and privacy for the Americas, has written a great article on W3C’s Do Not Track project (DNT). DNT extends the logic of Do Not Call legislation to the internet. If DNT (Do Not Track) is implemented, which it probably will be, probably next year, then a large part of online passive market research will become impossible. It will also be much harder for website to analyse their visitor and user statistics, which will, in turn, make it harder to optimise their sites and harder to make [...]
1 It’s not your classic textbook This book focusses on the questions that are part of the everyday practicalities of market research, the advice you don’t typically get from a textbook – the type of advice researchers would ideally have a mentor or more experienced colleague to ask – unfortunately not everyone has these support networks. 2 The contributors are practitioners The content has been prepared by a team of experienced researchers, so the advice is relevant for researchers who are talking to clients, writing proposals, managing projects, developing questionnaires, analysing data, reporting results, etc. 3 A great resource for [...]
The Gen2 Advisors, headed by Lenny Murphy, have produced an 80 page report on Social Media Analytics, entitled “From online chatter to meaningful insights”, which is available for purchase, and they have produced a free 10 page resource as a ‘How to’ guide (click here to access the free guide). The Gen2 Advisors were kind enough to share a copy of their full report with me and here are my thoughts, reactions, and observations. The report starts by highlighting that social media analytics is necessary but not sufficient. Brands need to use it, otherwise they will miss key insights, but [...]
Marketers and market researchers are always looking for stories that provide evidence for the value of what they do. Sometimes we get the evidence in the form of stories where people implement the research and the campaign and there is a positive outcome. But it is rare for the other story to be told, what happens when marketers, market research, indeed the whole principle of evidence based decision making, is ignored. However, the New York Times has a very clear expose of what happens when evidence is ignored, the story of Ronald B Johnson’s 17 months at the top of [...]
One of the questions I am frequently asked about insight communities is ‘Why are most of them composed solely of customers?’ ‘Surely’, some people ask, ‘we should be conducting market research with the whole market?’ My feeling is that this question fails to recognise how much market research has changed over time. Over the thirty-five years I have been in the research industry there have been quite a few changes, in terms of technology, organisation, methods etc. One of these changes has been a major shift from researching whole markets to focusing research on customers. If we look back at [...]
There is a widespread view that people in poverty pay more for their products and services than richer people. This price difference was described by C.K Prahalad and Allen Hammond as the poverty premium, in an article in the Havard Business Review (HBR) in 2002 – which Prahalad expanded on in his book ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid’. However, an article by Ethan Kay and Woody Lewenstein in the April 2013 edition of the HBR cast doubt on the theory, and showed results of an experiment that illustrated that the poverty premium is not always present. The [...]
I have spent the last couple of weeks in Australia as part of my role in Vision Critical University visiting a number of clients, and several of them have, or are in the process of, creating B2B insight communities. One of the great things about this sort of concentrated activity is that it encourages examination of the key issues, and this time that has included the question ‘why do people join online insight communities?’. I think the key point that companies need to remember, when designing, creating and managing insight communities, is that most people only join a B2B community [...]
One of the things that marketers, researchers, and administrators are often encouraged to do is to try to see things from the point of view of the insider, for example the customer, the respondent, or the user. Last week I came across a really clear example of the difference of between the insider and outsider view, and the consequences of using the wrong view. On this occasion the example came, perhaps surprisingly, from the world of lingerie. My daughter owns and runs a multi-channel lingerie business and needs to ensure that she addresses search engine optimisation for her website, MishOnline. [...]
As mentioned before (here and here), Navin William, Reg Baker, and I are producing a mobile marketing research module for the University of Georgia’s Principles of Marketing Research course. I have bounced some ideas off the readers of this blog, and here is another topic where I’d love to hear your views. Some of the most interesting work, to date, in terms of MMR (mobile market research) has been in the area of qualitative research and this is a key point for students of MMR to be aware of. The key areas of qualitative MMR: My feeling is that the [...]
Something strange seems to have happened in the world of market research since the publication of Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. Market researchers have recognised that the issues raised by Behavioural Economics (often referred to as BE) are highly relevant to market research and raise questions about some of the ways we have been doing business. However, there seem to be a remarkable number of market researchers who seem to asserting that BE is mostly a qual thing, or that the main implications of BE for market research will be a focusing on qual. Whilst [...]