Research on research

Curiosity Isn’t a Soft Skill—It’s a Research Strategy “Curiosity” often gets framed as a personality trait. Something soft. Optional. Maybe even a little whimsical. But in research? Curiosity is a core competency. It’s how you find the patterns your client didn’t think to look for and the ones a dashboard won’t tell you. I’ve seen […]

  Don’t Skip the ‘Other (specify)’ Box: Why Outlier Responses Matter It’s easy to overlook the “Other (specify)” box. It’s messy. It’s inconsistent. Sometimes it’s blank. But when I’m reviewing survey data, I always pause to review the other (specify) answers. Because that’s where unexpected ideas live. The “Other” box is where someone tells you: […]

What is social desirability bias? Have you ever found yourself answering questions in a way that wasn’t quite the whole truth, because you wanted to gain approval of the person asking you the question? For instance, when your doctor or the health coach at your employer asks you how much you exercise, have you ever […]

I experience a number of mobile moments every day and yesterday was no different. In this case, since I’m interested in customer journey mapping and mobile moment plotting, I’ll take you through the mobile moments of my experience with BJ’s Brewhouse. My husband and I were looking for a place to eat lunch on our […]

The seat you choose impacts your perception of others (and vice versa). Choose wisely. A RESEARCH STORY Many police departments video record interrogations in order to submit confessions into evidence in a jury trial. In the past, the video recordings often focused only on the face of the suspect, leaving the interrogator out of the […]

Feedback Surveys Net Promoter Scores I went to the eye doctor on Tuesday for my first annual check-up. What’s interesting about this year’s visit isn’t the visit itself, but the post-visit requests from the doctor’s office.  Two days after my visit, I received an email asking me to take a quick satisfaction survey about my […]

LOYAL CUSTOMERS ARE ENGAGED CUSTOMERS Over the past month I’ve been deep in survey design thought, absorbing material from Coursera, Marketing Profs, and Research Rockstar. I’m playing with the idea of a Brand EnSat study model that provides a robust picture of the engagement and satisfaction of a company’s customers. Part of this thinking was […]

Confession time. Five years ago I did not know the difference between a bipolar and a unipolar rating scale. What I knew about my job I learned on the job from my peers and managers. If they knew the difference between these types of scales, they did not share that information with me. And I […]

I love it when I see market research featured in late night talk shows. In January 2015, Conan O’Brien surprised one of his employees by taking him on a field trip to the Taco Bell headquarters in California to receive the Superfan experience. They met with marketing manager, Katie Garner, who defined the Superfan as […]

I just had a question on Google+ that I thought I would also post here: So….what IS unipolar (defined) and when would I ever use it? Thanks for the question: Unipolar scales measure an attribute across one dimension. For example let’s use hunger: not at all hungry, slightly hungry, moderately hungry, very hungry, extremely hungry. […]