Radiance Blog

This is the fifth in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa. To see our other posts, click here. While in South Africa, we stayed at a classic game lodge.  We ate impala at night and we slept in a tent (albeit the most luxurious tent I’ve ever seen), and in the [...]

This is the fourth in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa.  To see our other posts, click here.  This is a random observation, but we couldn’t miss it.  During part of our vacation, we went to a game lodge in South Africa.  While there was certainly a variety of household types and family types going [...]

We get a lot of inquiries about how to join our panel or participate in our focus groups, and consequently we spend a lot of time explaining that we don’t maintain this kind of recruiting list for participants.  (We custom recruit for almost all our groups.  We’ll explain why below.)  Some questions come from people [...]

This is the second in a series of posts on our recent trip to Africa.  To see our initial post, click here.  One thing that’s nice about traveling is being out with the public.  As researchers, we’re natural peoplewatchers, and this helps us with research designs when we’re back at our desks. Our first interesting [...]

I recently wrote a post on Google’s new service, Google Insights, which is an evolution of Google Trends.  As a result of that post, I ran across this post discussing if Google Trends is reliable. One of the examples used compared the term “market research” to “advertising” and showed that both terms declined (as a [...]

Tag clouds are, at this point in the history of the web, a well known and widely used method of classifying and displying the content of a website.  There are free services to help you design your own clouds (the picture below was designed in wordle). Some of the resulting clouds are quite artistic. The [...]

You probably have noticed that we’re pretty passionate about discussing good and less-than-good practices in market research on our blog (if you haven’t, check out here, here, here, here, and here). I was reading the book Why Smart Companies Do Dumb Things the other day and one of the things the author mentioned as a [...]

Ran across this site today, thanks to a Google alert. FaceStat – which allows you to rate (and be rated on) attractiveness, occupation, political leanings, and several other characteristics of random individuals who post their picture – seems to be one more twist in social networking sites that bills itself as “market research for the [...]

I love traveling. And unlike most people, I even like airports. There are few places that give you such an eclectic look at society. This makes them a great place for people watching. Back when I worked in specialty retail I use to observe people’s shoes at airports to see what brands were growing and [...]

Steve Jobs was recently quoted in Fortune’s America’s Most Admired Companies, as saying, “We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants.” Guess that explains why they haven’t called. I know that innovation often means going out on a limb—revolutionary products don’t come from asking consumers what they want next—but some basic research can prevent [...]