Market Research or Marketing Research?

February 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

QuestionMarkI recently heard someone express frustration at the widespread use of the term “market research” instead of “marketing research.” It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard this opinion, but it has been a while.

The argument goes something like this: we are researching marketing initiatives. Therefore what we do is “marketing research.” Markets are for people in finance. “Market research” is what equity analysts do.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the person expressing this opinion was not a spring chicken.

I’m sympathetic in some ways, because I do think it’s important to be precise with language. However, I do think there’s a case to be made that “market research” is accurate, because what we are providing research for how businesses can approach many different types of markets – the pharmaceutical market, the consumer packaged goods market, etc.

So I’m OK with either term.

But what do you think?

I posted a quick MicroPoll below so you can share your vote on which term you prefer.

Filed Under: Essay, Featured, MicroPoll Tagged With: , ,

Webinar: Mobile Field Data Collection on iPads and Tablets Using SurveyPocket

February 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s no secret that iPads and other tablet computers are changing the way people interact and communicate.

Did you know they are also changing the way we collect data?

In market research, many field teams are replacing pencil and paper with electronic tablet devices. Others are evaluating their options for doing so.

Have you heard the hype and want to join in on the action? Are you a bit overwhelmed when you think about getting started?

Join us on Wednesday March 7th, 2012 at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST for a free webinar hosted by Esther LaVielle and John Johnson from Survey Analytics. With over 12 years of combined experience in project management, market research, and software application training, Esther and John are here to train you and offer free guidelines how to use SurveyPocket to:

- Create and manage your own field project
- Train and manage your field research team on tablet use
- Synchronize/organize all data into an online report
- Share your field research results with your clients faster than ever before with dashboards and alerts

We will also share:

- A live demonstration of SurveyPocket, including new features
- Case studies from two of our clients: St. Jude Medical and the Country Music Awards

The webinar will conclude with a Q&A session.

See you there!

Here’s the link to register:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/252010630

Note: This post originally appeared on the SurveyPocket blog.

Filed Under: Events, Market Research, Mobile Tagged With: , , ,

An Oscar Tribute to a Market Research Pioneer

February 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

OscarUsually when I watch something like the Academy Awards, it’s an escapist pursuit. Believe it or not, I do stop thinking about research from time to time.

However, during last night’s Oscar ceremony, I was pleasantly surprised to see someone from the market research industry honored. Sadly, it was in the montage of people who have passed away in the last year.  Joseph Farrell, founder of entertainment researcher National Research Group, was honored as part of the 84th annual Academy Awards.

Farrell was the pioneer who helped introduce market research testing to the film industry.  His research is credited with helping the film Fatal Attraction settle on its electrifying ending, a key part of the film’s smashing success.

Here’s a link to Farrell’s obituary from the New York Times.

Entertainment research is such a significant part of our industry; I know dozens of researchers who currently or have in the past specialized in market research for movies and other avenues of entertainment.  It’s hard to imagine that industry without market research testing, since it’s such a significant part of the way Hollywood does business today.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’d like to thank the Academy…for honoring a market research pioneer.

Who are some other market researchers that should receive accolades from Hollywood? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

Filed Under: Featured, Market Research Tagged With: ,

Think Beyond iPad for Tablet Surveys

February 24, 2012 By 1 Comment

OSLogosResearchers, when you read about companies equipping their employees with iPads, I know you’re dreaming about beautiful, feature-rich, touch-based surveys for the B2B market.  In fact, this type of tablet-based survey is already being done today by the likes of SurveyPocket and others.

You need to start thinking beyond just the iPad, though.  The corporate market for tablets is up for grabs, according to a report by the Financial Times.

The report notes recent research by the NPD group indicating that 68% of company-supplied tablets are iPads.  However, it indicated that companies are taking a “wait-and-see” attitude when it comes to tablets, with Android presenting some security concerns, and with Microsoft not having yet launched its Windows 8 product, which is expected to be touch- and app-friendly.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. iPad has the first-mover advantage, but the market is growing fast.

Globally in Q4 2011 the tablet market grew dramatically; iPad’s market share was still dominant at 57%, but that figure was down from 64% in the prior quarter.

In addition to security and functionality, price has got to be a big factor moving forward.  I’ve got to believe that corporate purchasing departments will take notice of the iPad’s price tag, which is approximately double those of its competitors.

I have an iPad and am a huge fan of Apple products.  But double the price is a huge hurdle to overcome, especially in the corporate budgeting environment.

Sorry to make your job more complicated, but you need to start testing your tablet surveys on more than just the iPad.  To complete your survey coverage, you need to be thinking about Android, Blackberry and Windows.

Filed Under: How-To, Market Research, Mobile Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Is Mobile Market Research Growing Up?

February 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Is Mobile Research Growing Up?Is 2012 the year that mobile market research grows up? If you follow the money, the answer is yes.

I read with interest a recent summary on ESOMAR’s RW Connect of a report by Cambiar Consulting on 2011 capital funding in the market research industry.

Cambiar’s Simon Chadwick summarizes the key trends in capital investment by giving this advice to entrepreneurs: “you should be based in the United States; your product should have something to do with social media; and the word ‘analytics’ should appear liberally in your business plan.”

The report distinguished “analytics” companies from “market research,” noting that the former ($297M) saw significantly more investment than the latter ($138M).

But what really jumped out at me was a breakdown of investment in “new research modalities,” separating the two into categories, “winners” and “losers.”

Winners

Mobile $53M
Online ad measurement $46M
Sample/data collection $28M
Passive measurement $26M

Losers

Shopper insights $14M
Biometrics $2M
Qualitative $1M

Notably, Chadwick reported only $15M of investment in traditional full service research consultancies.

It seems investors are looking for a breakout year from the mobile market research sector.

I agree, and I think things will really come into focus at the Market Research in the Mobile World conference coming up in Amsterdam in April.  I’ll be there, and I hope to talk in person with a lot of Research Access readers while I’m there.

Onward and upward!

Filed Under: Market Research, Mobile Tagged With: , ,

“I Have A Research Idea”

February 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This Access Toon was inspired by the webinar I moderated today on the topic of Big Data.  One of the points discussed was that market researchers need to move beyond the traditional skill set in order to meet the challenge and opportunity of Big Data.  That got me thinking about the fact that, with some exceptions, it can be difficult for corporate market researchers to spend the time and money needed to keep on top of emerging trends and analytical techniques.

Filed Under: Access Toon, Market Research Tagged With: ,

Introducing the Research Life Podcast

February 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The Research Life Podcast

I’m proud to announce a new feature at Research Access:  the Research Life Podcast.

The subtitle of the Research Life Podcast is “Where Data Meets Life.”  In each episode, we’ll feature several examples of interesting news stories relating to data and/or survey results and talk about them.  The idea is to have a fun discussion of topical stories focusing on where data affects real life.

For our first episode I was joined by someone who is very familiar to Research Access readers – Esther LaVielle, VP of Client Services at Survey Analytics.  You may know Esther as the host of many of the webinars sponsored by Survey Analytics.  She is also a regular contributor to Research Access.

In our first episode, we discussed three interesting stories:

1. A story in Mashable that reported that indicated women buy more tech gadgets than men.

2. A new Pew Research Center study that looked at sources of information for the U.S. presidential campaign.

3. A New York Times Magazine article questioning the methodology of online dating sites.

Click the link below to to link to the iTunes site for the Research Life Podcast.

If you like what you hear, please give us an iTunes rating and review; it really helps!

Thank you!

iTunesPodcastLink

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What is “Big Data,” and What Can I Do About It?

February 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Big DataThere are a lot of buzzwords out there in market research, and Big Data is one of them. I’ve been hearing that term everywhere.

I’m proud to announce that Research Access is partnering with GreenBook to bring you a webinar to help you understand Big Data.

This is the first in a series of webinars to be brought to you in 2012 in an exciting partnership between Research Access and GreenBook.

The webinar is entitled, “Turning Big Data from a Headache to a Competitive Advantage,” and it will be held on Tuesday, February 21 at 1pm EST / 10am PST.

Click This Link to Register

We’ve assembled a panel of experts to help you understand Big Data and, more importantly, give you practical tips for how to analyze it and turn it to your advantage.

I will be moderating the session, and joining me will be four expert panelists:

Sign up for the webinar today, and when you attend, tweet your questions to the hashtag #mrxideas.

Filed Under: Events, Featured, How-To, Market Research Tagged With: , ,

Mobile Market Research Trends, Part 6: Hyperlocal Surveys

February 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

HyperLocal SurveysOn January 30th, 2012, Survey Analytics sponsored a webinar on Mobile Market Research Trends. The webinar was moderated by Esther LaVielle of Survey Analytics and featured Romi Mahajan, CMO of Metavana, and Chad Bhandari, co-founder of SurveySwipe. Today we bring you the full text of Part 6 of the webinar, which covered the topic of Hyperlocal Surveys.

Esther LaVielle

Esther LaVielle

Esther LaVielle: Fantastic, thank you. Now, let’s dig deeper into a kind of mobile ethnography, hyperlocal surveys. We talked about it a little bit already, just bringing it up through push notifications and mobile ethnography. How do you think this is– particularly hyperlocal surveys– how do you think this is going to change the way clients or companies should interact with their customers?

Romi Mahajan

Romi Mahajan

Romi Mahajan: Hyperlocal, what it’s really suggesting is that there are different types of patterns and behaviors depending again on the “c” word, context, right, in which the old notion of this unvaregiated mass of people that all make decisions like a herd is being put to the test. And so hyperlocal says that there might be neighborhoods, communities, particular buying contexts, particular geographies, parts of downtowns, et cetera, in which people have different behaviors and different patterns.

If you think about, there’s a huge movement all over the country to revitalize downtowns because the hyperlocality of a particular place changes the behavior and the tenor of both purchases and other things in that area. So again, a very, very powerful construct as long as it’s not overdone, right? As long as you’re not now dealing with millions of data sets when you’re trying to sell Tide detergent, right, because Tide detergent might or might not change depending on the hyperlocality of the context. But there are some products and services that do, and you just have to be smart about where you invoke hyperlocal and where you don’t.

But again, all of these things are just tools. They have to be wielded carefully, and a good market researcher knows that. And a bad market researcher will just use them all without thinking and actually create a Tower of Babel for him or herself.

Esther LaVielle: I do want to pose a question over to Chad. How exactly does hyperlocal work a person who’s on a panel?

Chad

Chad Bhandari

Chad Bhandari: So the way it works is you basically program a location and associate a survey with that particular location. And the location is basically defined by latlong of that place. And then you can define a radius where you can say if the panelist is within this radius, enters this circle, per se, of the radius that you define, the survey becomes available. So the panelist gets a push notification, and then they will instantly get the survey right there.

I think that is just the basic of what is possible. So we also have been experimenting with some heuristic based approaches where we’re trying to figure out if we can figure out if a panelist enters a particular store, let’s say Walmart, and stays there for half an hour, and then tagging all that information, keeping all that information, and then, after half an hour, assuming that they’ve left Walmart, send a customer satisfaction survey saying, hey, looks like you just visited Walmart. Did you visit Walmart? What did you buy? What did you not buy? Why did you not buy? Those kinds of things, traditional surveys that you want to do.

So really, you program the location, you associate the survey, and I think the key to understand here is that we can– the panelist gets the survey where they actually are. So the location context, and the time context, and the context of why they made certain decisions can be a very, very useful tool I believe.

Romi Mahajan: I know we’re about to jump into a demo, but I’ve got to riff off of what Chad is saying because there’s something even more granular that’s very powerful. Because when Chad talks about latitude and longitude, you can– I advise a company called Novitaz, and they’ve built an incredibly interesting wi-fi system where you could technically get the exact details of where somebody is in the store. So are they in the men’s section, and do they move to shoes, and how long do they stay there, and what was their behavior as you pushed out offers and coupons to them? And so hyperlocal allows you to not just pinpoint a specific store, but a part of a store, or a part of a neighborhood. It’s just very, very powerful.

That’s it for Part 6: Mobile Ethnography.  I hope you’ve enjoyed the series!  Check back regularly for more great webinars from Research Access.

Click This Link to Get the Webinar Video and Slides

Photo Credit

Filed Under: Events, Featured, Market Research, Mobile Tagged With: , , , ,

Mobile Market Research Trends, Part 5: Mobile Ethnography

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

mobile ethnographyOn January 30th, 2012, Survey Analytics sponsored a webinar on Mobile Market Research Trends. The webinar was moderated by Esther LaVielle of Survey Analytics and featured Romi Mahajan, CMO of Metavana, and Chad Bhandari, co-founder of SurveySwipe. Today we bring you the full text of Part 5 of the webinar, which covered the topic of Mobile Ethnography.

Esther Rmah LaVielle

Esther LaVielle

Esther LaVielle: All right, so let’s go ahead and move on to a really fun topic that I really like getting to which is mobile ethnography. So what’s the difference between mobile ethnography versus traditional ethnography, and what do you see as its benefits? Romi, do you want to start?

Romi Mahajan

Romi Mahajan

Romi Mahajan: Again, what mobile does is it offers you scenarios both in terms of time, and location, and context that traditional doesn’t. Ethnography – it’s an interesting word. Its background is anthropology. Where an anthropologist was studying, let’s say, a tribe or a people living halfway across the world, they would go there and actually get into the context of how these people lived. It wasn’t this parachuting in, parachuting out drivey-by type of knowledge collection, right?  And mobile ethnography allows you to go into the moment, into the location, and into the context of the people that you’re trying to learn from. So I have never been a person who’s been at the forefront and cheerleading of any trend because I think that a lot of this can be very self-serving. But I do believe that the mobile and local phenomenon is going to transform marketing and marketing research in a way that, while pundits are talking about it, no one really understands that we’re the notion of data and making it contextual wisdom. I’ve said that several times on this webcast, but if people go away with nothing else but that, it’s that mobile– the SoLoMo, really the mobile and local piece of that give you contextual wisdom, not just data that, frankly, data, there’s an overload of it and no one can make sense of it. But wisdom we can use.

So a very powerful concept. And again, platforms like SurveySwipe allow a person like me, a marketer without great technology savvy and without great budgets, and so on, and so forth to be able to conduct mobile ethnography with ease. And I thank entrepreneurs like Chad and like Vivek Bhaskaran of Survey Analytics for coming up with stuff like this.

Esther LaVielle: So what kind of technology do you think is going to make mobile ethnography so exciting? What kind of tech tools are you seeing that are going to be super beneficial? I don’t know, maybe taking pictures? What other things do you think is going to be beneficial when you’re using the mobile versus having someone observing people?

Chad

Chad Bhandari

Chad Bhandari: I’ll answer that. I think you have to think about what tools are available today and how mobile is going to enhance those tools. I think, like you said, photos, videos, the capability that phones have for scanning bar codes are very– when you look at a surface, it’s very simple. But when you contextualize it with the kinds of research that can be done, it’s not very far-fetched with mobile devices and the power that they have today to have a mom basically take a picture of all the products that she uses for breakfast. It’s not very far-fetched for folks to carry their phones and provide very deep contextual data about what they are performing at the moment.

So I think when you look at forums which were sort of passive, you have to have your laptop open to actually give feedback, so a lot of it was based on recall. With mobile, it’s instant. I think while it sounds simple, I think it can potentially provide very deep contextual data that could be very useful for marketing research.

Romi Mahajan: One of the areas that I’ve been thinking about, and I know people on this webcast must be thinking about a lot is, how do you go and understand, let’s say, consumer behavior in countries in which the economy is moving, but really ones in which they are some bereft of traditional infrastructure, right? I mean, how would you go and do real mobile ethnography in Brazil, or India, or Pakistan, or Bangledesh, or a place like that?

And obviously, the mobile devices, the burgeoning of the mobile world has allowed for that. And so we’re opening completely new vistas in research through this mobile revolution. And ethnography, again, like any disciplinary artifact, has to change with the times, and mobile’s absolutely making it far more powerful. So again, I think we’ve probably exhausted this subject, but again, a very powerful construct.

Esther LaVielle: Fantastic, thank you. Now, let’s dig deeper into a kind of mobile ethnography, hyperlocal surveys.

That’s it for Part 5: Mobile Ethnography.  The final installment of this series will cover the topic Hyperlocal Surveys.

Click This Link to Get the Webinar Video and Slides

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Filed Under: Events, Featured, Market Research, Mobile Tagged With: , , ,
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