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Friday, 13 August 2010 14:35 |
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A few months back I wrote about the dangers of tying results from satisfaction surveys to compensation. The feedback I got was mixed, so I decided to do a quick survey to see what the public thinks.
Of the 72% who were asked to do a follow-up survey after some type of transaction, about 1 in 6 (16.1%) were told by their sales rep what rating to give. While 1 in 6 is alarming, the reality is probably worse because those that do try to influence responses do so repeatedly. My personal guess is that more compensation is impacted the more likely it is that customers will be asked to answer in a certain way.
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Thursday, 24 June 2010 12:44 |
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I'm a regular reader of the Market Research Heretic Blog . The banner above his blog posts reads "Market Research Death Watch". Many great points are made about how we take respondents for granted and how many survey instruments simultaneously gather useless data and reduce the chances of that respondent ever doing another survey again. Most important, the point is made that the market research industry is resistant to change and ultimately that will lead to its demise.
The arrival today of the latest Honomichl 50 list certainly supports the notion that the industry is in trouble. The numbers are the most brutal I've ever seen. Revenue has declined and when you focus only on straight research firms (those doing primary qualitative and quantitative research) that decline is even larger. Employment has dropped even faster (and this is measuring research firm employment, I suspect client side researchers were hit even harder). Jack Honomichl is certainly dour in his column, but I think if anything he is understanding how bad a hit research took this year.
The question is, were the results of this year and last (2008 also showed declines) just related to the recession or do they reflect a trend that will continue long after the recession is officially over? My guess is, we will see some recovery with the better economy this year, but the heretic's warnings should not be ignored.
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Friday, 16 April 2010 12:52 |
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The research industry has for at least a decade now been facing two conflicting challenges. At the same time the representativeness and quality of data collected is being called into question, our clients are asking us to make our results tie to and be predictive of the real world. I believe that even with the limitations of response rate and respondent behavior, we can achieve good results by asking questions in the right manner. We need to mirror the way people make decisions in the real world…namely by making choices.
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Monday, 01 February 2010 17:11 |
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What got me thinking about this is the fact that my car lease is ending and I'm shopping. The last three times I've leased a new car, the process of picking it up has been identical. I go in, pay some money, sign a bunch of forms I don't understand, get a tour of the car's features and then I'm told that I'll be getting a survey and that I should give the highest marks on everything. Sometimes the salesman says "if there is something you can't give the highest mark on, tell me what I have to do to earn it", but they always say, "If I don't get the highest mark it will hurt my commission."
I recognize that the car company might not view this or use this as they would pure market research. In many respects they are like response cards (like hotels or restaurants use) or invitations to do a survey found on receipts. Even without all the controls pure market research puts in place, the data generated by these efforts can have tremendous value. My firm, for example, has used them to help establish the bottom line impact of various attributes.
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Thursday, 10 December 2009 12:01 |
Got an interesting question in my Linkedin morning update about the ethics of Market Researchers doing Market Intelligence work. While the question was vague enough to be unanswerable (what sort of Market Intelligence are you talking about?), it got me thinking about ethics. Specifically, I’ve been thinking that researchers are too often focused on strict ethical rules rather than on doing the right thing.
So, right off, let me state that I totally believe in obeying laws, regulations and, yes, ethics. This extends to our dealings with clients, vendors and, most importantly respondents. I wouldn’t want to work in an industry that doesn’t take ethical responsibility seriously. I'm concerned, however, that we don't apply ethical standards intelligently. This, in turn, works counter to the principles our ethics claim to protect and harms our effectiveness as an industry.
Telemarketers: Our Nemesis?
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Monday, 09 November 2009 19:00 |
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Ever wondered how paleontologists know what a dinosaur weighs? OK, me neither, but an article I read in The Economist points to mistakes in past methods and I believe understanding these mistakes can teach us a lot about how to be better researchers.
A dinosaur’s weight is estimated by taking the bone structure and weight of existing animals and then through linear regression predicting the weight of dinosaurs using only their bone structures. For example, a Brontosaurus (technically called an Apatosaurus, but I learned my dinosaur names watching The Flintstones) is estimated to weigh about as much as seven African elephants.
Dr. Gary Packard of Colorado State University wondered how well these equations would do at predicting the weight of living animals. In essence, he pretended we don’t know how much an elephant weighs. He took the weight and bone structure of smaller animals and then used a linear regression to predict an elephant’s weight using only its bone structure. The result was 50% more than an elephant weighs.
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