Category Archives: Research Trends

Conducting Competitive Comparisons – It’s the Context That Matters

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Susan McIntyre

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.” –Lao Tzu, founder of philosophical Taoism 

While this is advice to consider from a personal perspective, comparing your business performance to that of your competition is a common and necessary business practice.  Successful businesses regularly evaluate their business performance, including product and service performance, to that of their competition to identify areas of strength and improvement as well as future opportunities. This comparison includes obtaining critical feedback from customers and, in many cases, other business stakeholders, often through formal customer experience measurement.

But what is the best approach to comparison? 

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China and India’s Moment as Emerging Markets is Now

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David Ho

Market Strategies just wrapped up a company meeting in the scenic splendor of Mount Hood, Oregon. I updated my fellow US researchers with news of the Asia Pacific markets, the side of the globe where I reside and study. I started with this fact: China = 1,000,000,000. This is the current number of mobile phone subscriptions in the demographic giant. It reached the one-billion mark in the first quarter of 2012. And India = 900,000,000, a number that is accelerating and sure to catch up with China soon.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said recently, “If you count the greater China region as a whole, it now accounts for 12 percent of Apple’s full-year revenue for 2011. That’s up from just 2 percent in fiscal year 2009.” How can one not be awed by this unbelievable growth of a brand in any market in history?

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The Future of Market Research Reports

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Leona Foster

I’ve thought a lot about the consistent lament that most market research reports are written for market researchers and not top executives. The type of report my clients want has been described as “McKinsey-esque,” with “memorable sound bites” and a “30-second elevator speech” of the research findings. The storytelling factor we’ve talked about for several years seems to have become a table stake. 

But not everyone agrees on what a “consultative” report (aka “McKinsey-esque”) includes in terms of content and format. For some, it’s a compelling headline that summarizes the key findings of the page in, at most, two lines. For others, it’s a chart that is stripped of “market research stuff” such as base sizes, significance testing, means and standard deviations, question wording and caveats about small sample sizes. It appears that some reports are now being written as “infotainment” as suggested by Nancy Pekala of the American Marketing Association in a Marketing Research Forum email today:

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Revealing Today’s Most Social Brands

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Theo Downes-Le Guin

Social Media Brand Index

Get accurate rankings and insight for your social media investments

The late 1990s was a golden age for brand research, when many companies originated or beefed up their brand tracking and brand perception research programs. Consultancies like Interbrand and media outlets like Business Week introduced new ways to measure and index brand strength. I was at Intel at the time, and was fascinated (and a bit chagrined) to see how readily these indexes commanded attention from top management in contrast to our intricate, 26-country brand tracker.

Just as marketers obsessed over brand equity during that period, today we obsess over social media—so much so that we’ve already seen a backlash against the very concept of social media marketing. Nevertheless, I am struck by how little meta-analysis of brands’ success with social media exists. By meta-analysis, I mean attempts to understand how brands function and succeed in social media above the level of individual channels (e.g. Facebook likes).

Companies are swimming—perhaps drowning—in web analytics, but they still have no idea where they are located in relation to other swimmers. That was the genesis of Market Strategies’ inaugural Social Media Brand Index.

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Math Awareness Month Spotlights the Data Deluge

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Jack Horne

April is Mathematics Awareness Month (MAM), which is sponsored each year by the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM) and three other mathematical societies. This year, JPBM selected “Mathematics, Statistics and the Data Deluge” as its theme. The poster shows a stylized human figure holding a bright red umbrella against a rain of data and asks: “What would you do with all this data?”

This idea could not be more topical for us as market researchers today. We are literally deluged with data – created by us, collected from us and pushed back to us – in ways that didn’t seem imaginable only a few years back. A recent infographic from SanDisk makes the claim that more video is now uploaded to YouTube in a single month than was created by the three major television networks in 60 years. Similar examples from just about all industries abound.

To answer the question on the MAM poster, what we’re trying to do is mine the data for insights.

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10 Signs You’re Passionate About Market Research

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Emily Sippola

For working parents like me, every single day is an endurance event. My day starts early enough to hit the gym before getting my kids washed, dressed, fed and out the door, and it ends late enough that even I sometimes forgive myself for hitting the snooze button. By the time I start work for my paid employment, I have been on the go for three hours, and I’m ready to sit, relax and do some market research.

My friends used to laugh about how much I love my job despite the long, hectic days before and after work, but everyone around me has come to accept that this is work I love to do. I’m passionate about market research. Are you?

Here are ten ways to know:

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Market Research’s Identity Crisis

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Theo Downes-Le Guin

Over the past 10 years I’ve been involved in multiple conversations about whether market research needs a new name. I’ve always considered this the height of folly and magical thinking. People in a marketing-allied profession should recognize that changing industry names is difficult and rarely addresses underlying concerns. The strategy usually fails even as a marketing gesture (I doubt we will all be referring to the coal industry as clean coal a few years hence).

Our industry’s feints in the direction of a new identity, expressed through agency brand launches and client job titles, haven’t been promising. “Consumer insights” was faddish and excludes large swathes of the industry, such as business-to-business. Variations on the theme of “prediction” set a very high bar and again exclude the many facets of MR that are less than predictive but more than reportage. Various attempts to describe research in management consulting terms projected a slightly embarrassing sense of industry insecurity.

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Three MR Ideas to Drive Customer-Centric Innovation

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Keri Christensen

French novelist Marcel Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  

I recently attended an energizing and thought provoking conference titled “Capturing Deep Insights to Promote a Consumer-Centric Innovation Process.”  I wanted to share a few takeaways that build on thoughts about innovation.

Use New Research Tools to Uncover Trends

Market researchers who want a “seat at the table” in their organizations need to think about how to uncover growth opportunities and potentially disruptive market trends. Several speakers talked about how small-scale exploratory projects and fast iterative approaches allowed their team to use new research tools and make mistakes that led to learning—without the onus of an expensive research project. A shout out to Tom Van Aman at Allstate, Nina Mills at Fidelity Investments and Ann Semeraro at Ask.com for sharing case studies that demonstrated how being a risk taker is not diametrically opposed  to being a researcher.

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Accurate Data is Just the Beginning

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Paul Donagher

What is the data saying? Or, is it what are the data saying? Once I became an “are” person, I found it hard to go back to “is,” though I am assured these days it’s more personal preference than a serious grammar offense. However, the real issue here is not the grammar but the premise–because data can’t speak. In fact, data can’t do anything. It is only when data can be analyzed and interpreted that any value is developed. Companies do not flourish by being data-driven, they flourish by being analytically driven. It is through the analysis and interpretation of data that we can develop actionable knowledge.

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Big Data: From Buzz to Value

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George Wilkerson

One can’t help but be engulfed by the continuously growing buzz around “Big Data,” yet few of us stop to ponder the implications. In reality, the convergence of several clear trends leads us to a new, and perhaps better, way to understand preferences and predict behaviors of fellow human beings. Some of these trends are:

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