Inside Market Research

Who's reading Inside Market Research?

Published on 2011-06-04 10:11:00

Last month, we passed the sixth "candy or iron" anniversary of Inside Market Research without much fanfare. While the blog was launched in May 2005, it wasn't until April 2006 that the Google Analytics monitoring widget was installed. I'm a big fan of Google Analytics and other web traffic tools (like StatCounter). These tools allow a publisher to learn more -- often times much more -- about who is visiting the website and how they're using it.For the 5-year history of the Analytics-enabled b

Trusting results of product concept research

Published on 2010-11-10 21:01:00

Any quantitative study that tests purchase interest in a new or unfamiliar product concept will produce results that are likely to be questioned or doubted by even those who designed the study. At my current employer, the Market Research team has made great strides and taken considerable effort to try to normalize the variance that occurs in estimated take-rates from product to product, study to study. We've done this by:Creating standardized wordings for questions capturing interest and purchas

The importance of competitive bidding

Published on 2010-10-10 09:10:00

When businesses seek to conduct impartial research about a subject near and dear to them, I think it's an important practice of good governance to obtain competitive proposals and quotations from at least three reputable vendors.I don't think it's good practice to allow "the new guy" to wire the contract to his former employer, then when publicly called out about it, to ignore the problem entirely. It would seem that the world's fifth-most popular website doesn't see things my way.Congratulatio

What is Field and tab?

Published on 2010-03-22 23:01:00

A wiki formatted definition, as I write it, is:'''Field and tab''' refers to a limited set of services provided in the [[marketing research]] industry. The name refers to the task of '''''field'''ing'' a questionnaire (that is, interviewing consumers or whomever is the target market, to get their response data to an array of questions), then '''''tab'''ulating'' the resulting data into convenient two-dimensional tables (called "cross-tabulations"), based on answers to at least two of the ques

Power law curve in surnames

Published on 2010-01-14 06:05:00

There are purportedly six million unique surnames in the United States.Think about that. Considering how many Smiths and Johnsons are running about, that means there are millions of surnames being clutched onto by only a handful of survivors. Indeed, the New York Times says that while 151,000 surnames were shared by a hundred or more Americans, four million were held by only one person. For some reason, I suspect that spelling typos are responsible for at least a million of those. How many c

Who's a recognized authority?

Published on 2009-09-16 10:01:00

Another debate on Wikipedia. What fun.Wikipedia's article about "Churn rate" at this moment (though it won't last long) contains an external link to my blog post about churn rates. A couple of editors have indicated that the link is inappropriate, because I am not a "recognized expert" or "recognized authority" on churn rates. The blog post comes up as the #2 Google search result (after Wikipedia) when you search for 'churn rates', and it is this blog's most heavily visited page.We have one p

Restaurants on the Web - Part 2 of 3

Published on 2008-12-20 22:11:00

Hamburger Hank's is a clean, presumably friendly burger joint found in Fountain Valley, California. If you search Google for the words "Hamburger Hank's" (in quotation marks), you get only 14 pages returned. So, this is clearly no Wendy's or Burger King mega-chain.A page from Pubcrawler.com is the first result, and nobody on that site has bothered to review the restaurant. Just a bit lower in the results, we see our very own blog, thanks to our most recent post mentioning that we'd be talking

Restaurants on the Web – Part 1 of 3

Published on 2008-10-18 08:00:00

I love good food. Bestowed with a metabolism that allows me to eat until full, three meals a day without blimping out, I consider it a true blessing.So, with that in mind, I tend to hold in high value the restaurant industry, though I wouldn’t know the first thing about managing a restaurant. I probably know a bit more about Internet marketing, though; and that's going to be the topic of discussion in this post. Specifically, why do some restaurants fail to market themselves on the Internet

Internet users per household

Published on 2008-07-02 10:36:00

I'm looking for data that would help estimate the number of Internet users per household (or, rather, "per Internet-connected household") in the United States.If you perform a web search for "Internet users per household", you get a bunch of sites -- all of which are addressing this question in a country other than the United States.Isn't this the sort of information our government should track in some way? There's a bill that wants to mandate a study of applying net neutrality regulations to h

Bradley Joseph atop Wikipedia

Published on 2008-06-24 11:41:00

The featured, front-page article on Wikipedia today is about musician Bradley Joseph. His musical talents include "hired by Yanni", "lead keyboardist for Sheena Easton", and "included in multiple various-artist compilation albums, most recently the 2008 release of The Weather Channel Presents: Smooth Jazz II". I can't imagine how many iterations of smooth jazz from the Weather Channel will ultimately be necessary to exhaust the genre, but apparently we're already up to Volume II. There is some d