• It’s the consumer stupid; go find out what real people are up to!

The Price of Convenience: The sense and nonsense of listening to consumers*

06 Nov 2015

Questioning ordinary people’s contribution to marketing is akin to Pussy Riot challenging Putin’s rule in a church – it’s heresy. Yet neuropsychology, behavioural economics and more recently Byron Sharp suggest that our notion of consumer-centricity and what it means to ‘listen’ to people are based on a naïve concept of human beings and the world we live in.

Think like a Respondent to Improve Survey Data Quality*

01 Oct 2015

We’ve come a long way in the practice of survey research in terms of understanding and managing sources of error such as scale usage bias, but an accumulation of research into the unobservable cognitive processes that come into play when respondents answer survey questions shows that crafting survey questions that reliably elicit the information we think we are asking for is no easy matter. In fact, the survey question may be the weakest link in the chain of components that comprise the typical quantitative market research study.

  • TV show formats are a great innovative idea to design qualitative research

Who Said Research is Boring? *

09 Sep 2015

Every contact point a researcher gets with a consumer represents a huge opportunity to explore and discover new consumer truths. Yet at the same time it is getting increasingly difficult to maximise the moments of engagement with the growing breed of disengaged consumers. Living in an age of instant gratification and unbridled hedonism conventional market research is seen by the man on the street as excruciatingly boring.

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