The action on the basketball court didn’t stop. But as I peered down at my phone while attending the first round of the 2020 PAC 12 Men’s Basketball Championship in Las Vegas, my world as I knew it, did. The tournament was being postponed amid COVID 19 concerns and down like a house of cards […]
We’ve likely all been there. Whether it’s after a customer service phone call, a visit to an automotive dealership or even a resort, a sales person or customer facing agent has subtly or directly encouraged you to respond to a pending customer satisfaction survey with the highest rating possible. And chances are, if we are kind […]
Professional marketing researchers are in an interesting predicament. We’ve been conditioned to exercise methodological and analytical rigor. We pride ourselves on an ability to dive deeply into data and find nuance beyond basic descriptive statistics. As such, the best of us draw out deep insights that may not be intuitive and often lend themselves to […]
The sudden and unexpected demise of Canada’s Marketing Research and Intelligence Association yesterday was disheartening. MRIA has been a longtime association partner of MRII, and we have worked closely together to promote the continuing education of Canadian researchers and their certification through MRIA’s Certified Marketing Research Professional program (CMRP). Beyond that, MRIA has been a […]
When I oversaw marketing for a cruise line, many years ago, one of the unique challenges that we faced, as I suspect it is for many CMOs, was the task of justifying the ROI on our marketing. We were an interesting company, among those in the travel space, in that our CEO and many of […]
I can still recall my frustration in receiving countless emails and voicemails during my years as a client-side marketing researcher in the sports, media and leisure industries. The pitches all took on a familiar and uninformed tone. They thought that our company sounded really cool…and they were a “great” marketing research company that could deploy […]
Traditional survey research has always been a powerful tool with which to assess and track brand strength. A long time client advocate of brand tracking once asserted to me that he liked his odds of capturing meaningful share of customer if he could keep his products within the target consumers’ consideration set. But over time that […]
In the never ending conga-line of purported shiny new methodologies purported to relegate traditional marketing research to the scrap heap, “big data” has certainly captured its share of attention in recent years.  There’s been an ongoing popular debate among insights professionals regarding the utilization of behavioral data (BIG DATA) as a surrogate for or even […]
Even when I was a lot younger, I often scoffed at the proliferation of research agencies that claimed to have developed a cutting edge new methodology. Maybe it’s my dual background as both marketer and marketing researcher that cast a skeptical eye towards these new product assertions as merely puffery. When I began to build […]
I still remember my first time. Some 25 years ago as a young marketing executive at the PGA of America, I hypothesized that profiling golfers by simply looking at behavioral metrics like annual rounds of golf played, wasn’t helping us to capture their emotional connection to the game that could potentially trigger more resonant marketing […]