Qualitative Research
1/29/09
Observation rooms … they’re not just for focus groups
My wife is a fourth year veterinary student at Colorado State University, and on a recent visit to the veterinary teaching hospital I noticed they had several focus group rooms – sort of. I recognized the rooms immediately – two-way glass, audio and video recording, etc. Instead of group discussions though, they use the rooms […]
By David KennedyRead More
10/27/08
Another great tool…Twitter search
We blogged before about Google Trends and Google Insights, and now there is another online tool to add to your repertoire. Twitter Search allows you see what the masses of microbloggers are saying about you, your brand, or anything else you can imagine. Another great way to get a pulse of what is being said […]
By David KennedyRead More
10/17/08
Ethnography as it should be
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 […]
By Kevin RainesRead More
10/10/08
Safaris and girls, girls and safaris
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 […]
By Kevin RainesRead More
10/6/08
Professional survey respondents
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 […]
By David KennedyRead More
9/26/08
Customer service and the little things
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 […]
By Kevin RainesRead More
8/20/08
Reliability of Google Trends
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 […]
By David KennedyRead More
8/15/08
Cloudwatching
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 […]
By Geoff UrlandRead More
8/11/08
More defective research…from the inside
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 […]
By David KennedyRead More
6/30/08
Market research for the individual
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 […]
By David KennedyRead More