Market Research Blog

Market Research Training

Recipe for eLearning: A Letter from Research Rockstar’s Director of eLearning Curriculum

President, Kathryn Korostoff, was clear: it was time to raise the bar on self-paced learning for the market research industry. She gave me a mission: continue delivering the same high-quality content while improving student comprehension and retention. Oh, and keep it fun.

I knew this would be harder than “just add water.” Still, at least I had a library of existing, great content with which to work, and for eLearning developers like myself, that’s not always the case.

To get started,…

November 17, 2014 1 Comment

Agency Selection

110 Ways to Handle Project Overload

End of year can be a surprisingly busy time for market researchers. Some clients have “left over” budget they need to spend. Others are trying to get a head start on 2015. And then you get a few of those “rush” projects that seem to pop up at the worst possible times.

What if you could temporarily expand your research team with the precise skills you need to cover these temporary spikes? You can.

November 12, 2014 No Comments

Micro Topics

Is Your Market Research the Functional Equivalent of an iToaster?

Is it the functional equivalent of an iToaster? Sure Apple has a loyal fan base that would get excited if it launched an iToaster. But the company enjoys a broader base because it consistently raises the bar on ease of use and innovation. If Apple started launching new products with dramatically less intuitive user interfaces and featuring stale technology, its new launch momentum would be lost. And quickly. How can we apply Apple’s momentum lessons to market research? We need to show people that we researchers are raising the bar on ease of use and innovation…

October 31, 2014 No Comments

Customer Insights

Article Synopsis: How to Link Customer Loyalty to Profits

[Article synopsis]…Another hot topic in customer research is NPS (Net Promoter Score), based on self-reported likelihood to recommend as a measure of loyalty. However, as the author points out, respondents may give high recommendation scores at the same time they give low satisfaction scores, as satisfaction and recommendations are often driven by different factors. And haven’t we all seen cases where…

October 21, 2014 1 Comment

Best Practices

Article Synopsis: Quantitative or Qualitative Research Methods, Let’s Go Back to the Basics

data, different statistical methods and models can give different readings. Gray states, “Causation requires correlation of some kind but correlation and causation are not the same.”

When looking at probabilities and categories, Gray cautions the researcher to, “Avoid confusing the possible with the plausible and the plausible with fact. It’s also not difficult, though, to miss something of genuine practical significance that lies hidden beneath…

October 21, 2014 No Comments

Best Practices

12 Actionable Tips from the 2014 MRA Corporate Researcher’s Conference

The MRA’s Corporate Researcher’s Conference (CRC) was full of great sessions and first-class attendees. And I came home with a pile of business cards that are covered with scribbled down notes for follow-up. If you didn’t make it to CRC this year, here is a sampling of my notes from this 2.5 day event.

1. Sally Hogshead: High performers tend to specialize & tend to over-deliver in one area. I find this to be true, though she said it more articulately than I ever have.
2. Sally Hogshead: Successful brands know how they are different and what they do best. They avoid the “all things to all people” trap…

September 23, 2014 1 Comment