Leo Lewis, Principal from Corona Insights and Jenni Cooper, President of Periquin Strategy will deliver an interactive, hands-on workshop, which will cover three major opportunities to successfully integrate market research:

1. Product launches
2. Concept testing
3. Informing advertising.

You’ll learn all about how to conduct a qualitative study including scope, instrument design,
recruiting, logistics, implementation/moderating, and analysis. And you’ll review key criteria to pay
attention to in each step.

From outsourcing to a professional firm to a perfectly acceptable do-it-yourself approach; come
prepared to share, learn and maybe even debate a little along the way!

The event takes place this coming Monday, May 24th, from 5pm to 7pm at the University of Denver, University Hall.  Click here for more details and to register.

The Economist summed it up nicely in an article from last week’s edition.

When asked whether they supported a variety of issues, most people showed strong support.  However, when the downsides of those propositions were pointed out, support decreased significantly.  The strongest example was support for outfitting soldiers with the best equipment – 83% strongly supported.  When reminded that it would mean less spent on public services that they’d receive, support dropped to 46%.

Interestingly, alcohol bucked the trend.  When asked if the government should try to limit people’s boozing by taxing alcohol more 32% strongly agreed.  When reminded that it would mean they’d personally pay more for alcohol, there was no statistical change.  Presumably, people understood this issue well enough from the start and knew it meant they’d pay more, and therefore that was already calculated into their first response.

Many, if not all, issues can be framed in terms of gains or losses for those concerned.  Asking a question that only addresses one side of the coin is considered a research bias.  Pundits and politicians may rely on biased questioning to sway support for their beliefs, but researchers shouldn’t.

In the end, be careful what you’re asking.  People don’t make decisions in  a vacuum and your research shouldn’t be conducted in one either.

Enter Pivot.

As the Economist recently described in a special report, the amount of data we are creating is immense.  So much so that we can’t even store it all, let alone make sense of it.  Tools like Pivot, and many others, are designed to help us create true connections and insight.

You can watch the video below – and remember these people were indicating the need before Twitter took off – I think the Mashable article summed it up best:

“Sometimes you just need to ask people what they want, and they’ll give you great answers on how to evolve your service.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Twitter Feasibilty Study Excerpt (2006) from 747 Media on Vimeo.

So, we were very happy to see this article on ABCnews.com discussing the results of a recent study by Stanford University scientists (full report here), showing that, in fact, opt-in panels produce results that are significantly less accurate than results from randomly- (i.e., probabilistically-) selected panels.  And perhaps even more important, weighting the results from the opt-in panel to match population demographics did not increase accuracy in the opt-in panel results.

In a sense, these results vindicate our commitment to using only proven, high-quality research methodologies, to ensure that our clients receive results they can trust – results they can rely on to make decisions.

I walked over to the post office across the street to mail it, and was surprised to see a table there that was manned by a temporary U.S. Census worker.  Above the table was a sign that said, “Census Questions Answered Here”.  I can never resist a census worker, so I wandered over and asked her what type of questions she was fielding.

None yet, I was told, because the census forms had not yet been delivered.  They were being proactive, I guess, so I won’t second-guess that.  So I asked what types of questions they were expecting.  Atop the basic questions about content and how to answer certain questions, the friendly census worker showed me her various language forms, 60 or more, with instructions in languages ranging from Somali to Polish to Creole, and said that language was a likely issue.  So she was prepared for Problem #1, which was making sure that people could understand the forms.

Problem #2 was access.  This was a small town with significant “informal housing” by an immigrant workforce, so she mentioned that many residents live in informal housing such as garages, spare rooms, and other homes without formal addresses.  Making sure that all of these people receive census forms was a potential problem, so much so that they were actually hand-delivering the forms rather than mailing them.  So Problem #2 was making sure that everyone had access to a form, which is another reason to have a physical presence at the post office.

And finally, she mentioned the big picture.  Why are people receiving these forms?  Why should they fill them out?  The census worker was ready and prepared to talk to people about all the reasons to fill out a census form.

Of course, they were doing the same thing that we at Corona do, but on a larger scale.  Anyone can throw questions up on survey monkey or zoomerang and generate numbers.  The key, though, and the hard part, is to generate accurate numbers and relevant numbers that truly answer your questions.   On surveys, you do this by making sure that you’re reaching a representative portion of the population, by making sure they understand what they’re being asked, and by maximizing their likelihood of responding.  On a census, you do this by making sure that you reach everybody, by making sure they understand what they’re being asked, and by maximizing their likelihood of responding.  And you do this via good distribution and by explaining the value of what you’re doing.

Kudoes to the people at the Census Bureau for their hard work in making sure that the government – and Corona Insights – has good census data to analyze for our clients.

What do we do with Census data once it is released?  Check out our data analytics practice to find out some of the ways we utilize census data.

Baseball and statistics are inseparable.  There seems to be a stat for every aspect of the game from the classic batting average, ERA, and strikeouts, to the more complex “sabermetrics” BABIP, BsR, and EqA.  Compiling the voluminous data to create these statistics is a monumental task, but making use of the numbers is a greater challenge.

Bloomberg, known for their financial analysis, is hoping to use their expertise to help major league baseball teams.  Bloomberg is focusing on determining trends in order to predict future performance.  Major league teams already compile much of the same information, but the advantage of the Bloomberg system is the speed at which teams can access the data and having one repository for all stats.  The data is not limited for distribution to major league teams; Bloomberg also has a similar product available to fantasy baseball players.

One more way analytics can provide a competitive advantage.  In this case, literally.  The three of us just hope our team, the St. Louis  Cardinals, are making full use of it.

With organizations needing to justify every dollar spent – and needing to make the most out of the resulting findings – not integrating market research is a costly error.

While Corona is not a department within a larger organization, we have seen similar issues from our outsider’s viewpoint.

How can market research be more fully integrated into the strategic infrastructure? Some thoughts…

• Include market research from the beginning. When large strategic questions start to arise market research should already be at the table.
• Have market research assess your in-house data to see what questions you might be able to answer with your existing data that could guide future directions.
• Promote market research to be an equal partner, not just a support function.
• Market research should be an integrated member of teams, not an outsider.
• Finally, to build trust, the first steps of integrating the market research component should be to focus on “small wins” – starting small with little projects creating little successes and slowly increase the scope and participation of market research that will lead to greater successes on larger projects down the road.

What other issues do you see? What else can be done?

As we work to use social media for greater insights, from data mining to online communities, new ethical considerations come to light.

The above post raised concerns about quoting social network posts verbatim because of the potential to track down who said what through searches, thus revealing the poster’s identity.

This is just one more ethical consideration in addition to overall online privacy concerns, misuse of data/findings (e.g., allowing research participants to be targeted/contacted by marketers? … Reminds me of the Domino’s’ ads), and using online research as a guise for selling (i.e., Sugging).

What other concerns do you see cropping up that researchers need to be aware of?

Of course it really doesn’t matter what I think anyway. I’m sitting on my couch eating popcorn while the experts are the ones judging the competition. They watch, and based on their expertise and experience, label the performances with their best opinion as to what it was “worth.” Then the Olympian sits down in front of a camera, and with an anxiety level that I will probably never truly be able to understand, receives their score minutes later.

How’s that for feedback? The athlete finishes a routine. He or she likely knows a few places where they could have done better and places where they excelled, but isn’t sure how other parts of the routine may have gone…they don’t know what the judges saw or felt, and furthermore, how that compares to the competition.  As an analyst who is always looking for connections and meaning, I can’t help but think how this compares to a company’s desire to understand their own performance, and to have that kind of feedback from customers.

What would your score be?  What would flash up on the screen after someone takes their first bite of your product, or visits your store? What do your fans think…and what do your biggest critics think? Why? You probably have some excellent hypotheses and reasons that you already know are true, but there are quite often others tucked away within both your current and potential customers. Enter, research.

Using research to learn more about your audiences is nothing to be ashamed of, especially when you want those gold nuggets of information in the form of feedback. Heck, even NBC is dropping some serious moola to learn more about media consumption among viewers of the Olympics. They’re combining classic research techniques such as interviews, with the monitoring of social media websites, among other methods. It’s interesting that a media behemoth like NBC still doesn’t pretend to have it all figured out. They use research to stay ahead of the game, and to know their audiences. It’s how they keep their “score,” so to speak, high. (Unless, perhaps, you speak with Conan O’Brien.)

Visa uses the slogan, “Go World” for their campaign. Me? As a huge fan of the Olympics as well as capitalism, all I can say is, “Go athletes! Go business!”

Want to understand your score?  Corona can help you discover how you stack up among your competition.