Welcome back to Market Research Optimized! After an hiatus, Dr. Bob returns. A quick one, today, to be sure. And a little macabre humor about market research. When yours truly began his career in the industry, MR was still pretty much a corporate backwater. Slightly suspicious. Since those days, MR has gone from shady to necessity. When I started hearing managers say let’s run that past some focus groups, I knew the trouble was finally starting. Not really; I jest. Interesting though that as the market research industry is evolving into an internet/social media-driven space, “old” MR is finally square in the public eye, both the the ad from Domino’s of late and the spot below developed by BBDO. Hope you enjoy it. I’m still laughing. (Hey, I think I’ve been in that facility!)

Regards, Dr. Bob

In the delightful Marx brothers’ film, A Night at the Opera, Chico and Groucho discuss a contract.

Image via Wikipedia

Groucho: “That’s in every contract, that’s what you call a sanity clause.”

Chico: “You can’t a fool a me. There ain’t no sanity clause.”

In many organizations, market researchers are often the sanity clause or, more rightly, the sanity check on squishy information.

Take for example the recent headlines around the web that Facebook is responsible for one out of every five divorces. Goodness, what a great headline!

Step back and investigate even a little and one soon discovers that the headline plays fast and loose with the underlying data.

The headline was generated based on a press release from Divorce-Online.co.uk. Here is the salient portion of the release:

“Divorce-Online scanned their divorce petition database for the use of the word Facebook, and found 989 instances of the word in over 5,000 divorce petitions sampled.

This means that just under 20 per cent of all the petitions filed through the company had references to Facebook within the text of the divorce petitions.”

That alone is a far cry from one in five divorces were caused by Facebook. When did mention morph into causality?

Turns out as well that the sample of divorce petitions skewed to the young and was sourced in Great Britain which does not allow divorce without cause.

However, the juiciness of the headline overrode any sense of subtlety or just plain old fact-checking. Besides, it sounds so plausible.

It may not be accurate but it sure is salacious. So, let’s publish!

Part of our responsibility as market researchers is to do the fact-checking, to understand the limitations of our data and help our clients apply research conclusions to the highest advantage.

And in today’s voracious world where public relations and spin often govern, that is a tall order.

Are we up for the job?

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Okay, time for a little rant!

As a market researcher, I believe in and have seen demonstrated empirically over and over the power of market research in providing critical input to management issues. And I have participated in the development and deployment of customer satisfaction research and analysis for a number of years now.

But sometimes market research is misused as a proxy for common sense.

How’s that, Dr. Bob, you ask?

Well, over the weekend, I had reason to call the insurer of my cell phone to file a claim. My beloved Droid simply died.

I had been to the insurer’s website, filed a claim, only to be told that I was not covered.

I then looked at my cell carrier’s bills to make certain that, yes indeed, I was paying a monthly fee for insurance coverage with said insurance carrier. I was.

So I called the cell service provider. Yes, they assured me, I was covered and helpfully gave me the toll-free number to call.

I did.

And I waited, on hold. I don’t know how long. Now, sitting on hold is annoying enough, especially when the information provided on the website (I was not covered) was patently false.

Then………………..the zinger.

On hold, I am treated to the repetition of two messages, every 30 seconds (you have the time and awareness to measure such items while you’re on hold).

Message number one: Don’t want to wait on hold? Visit our website for prompt and fast service.

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? Well, I’m calling because of a problem with the website. As Homer would say, “Do’oh!

Message number two: We are experiencing a heavy call volume. We value your time and thank you for your patience.

Customer service management, here’s a news flash. Telling customers waiting on hold that you value their time while you are patently demonstrating to them with every passing message, repeated ad nauseum, you do NOT value their time, royally pisses off customers.

You are increasing customer dissatisfaction with every passing minute. Then you have the hutzpa to tell me how much concern you have that you are wasting my time.

At least have the decency to be honest: play a clip from a very old Saturday Night Live commercial that spoofed AT&T ads before the bohemoth had any competition: “We don’t care; We don’t have to.”

How do you think I responded to their customer satisfaction survey I encountered at the end of my call? Gee, I wonder.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

P.S. Actually, the customer satisfaction survey only asked about the agent’s performance once I reached them. Yet another demonstration of totally missing the mark. And how many agents are receiving bad marks because customers are really upset about sitting on hold interminably but have no way to register or vent their anger except by giving the agent a poor mark? Hmmmmmmmmm……………………………………..

Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, stands tall in the long history of self-help and self-improvement literature. And it is more than that.

Purposely chock-full of tidbits and easily-accessible chunks of useful information, it is easy to turn to any page at random and pick up useful advice about relating to our fellow human beings.

Guy’s basic premise is that in order for a leader, an entrepreneur, or an executive or manager to marshal the human, financial and physical resources to execute a vision, one needs to enchant. And he should know, having been Chief Evangelist for Apple in its early days and rubbing shoulders with Steve Jobs, perhaps the finest business enchanter of our day.

For market researchers, Enchantment could be quite helpful in providing guidance on client relationships. Sometimes we tend to get caught up in numbers and statistics, graphs and charts, and assume that a well-constructed logical argument will usually win the day. And we often learn the hard way that that’s just not so.

To success in business is first and foremost a matter of mastering relationships, selling oneself and selling ideas and concepts.

Enchantment provides a modern roadmap to doing so.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Now, market research is rarely as dramatic as in the RJR example in the previous post. But this story conveys an essential point. The bottom line of market research is to guide organizations in making investments, large and small.

We do so through both confirming the validity of product development, marketing strategies and campaigns, and changes to customer-facing internal processes.

Of course, everyone likes a winner. Clients tend to be jubilant, or at least pleased, when market research confirms the viability of a concept, product or change they have developed and nurtured.

But market research also has a role as in the story above: to warn management about product/service concepts or changes that will either fail or negatively impact the bottom line.

Type I and Type II error tests are critical here. Rather than simply go with the gut, or management consensus, careful, thoughtful and valid market research can help guide winners and avert losses. Both roles are crucial.

Comments welcome. Dr. Bob

So what is the bottom line on market research?

There is a delightful scene in the 1993 film, Barbarians at the Gate, the story of the hostile takeover of RJ Reynolds in 1988.

The iconoclastic CEO of RJR, F. Ross Johnson, played by James Garner, is furiously fighting off Kravis Roberts for control of the company. Johnson has bet the ranch, so to speak, on developing a smokeless cigarette. The company’s labs are diligently working on the product but time is running short.

In the scene in question, Johnson visits the lab for a presentation regarding initial market research results on the prototype.

A market researcher, a dweeb-ish fellow with a white lab coat, is obviously nervous.

He’s doing everything he can not to come to the point.

Researcher: “Now eight percent of that one group sampled at least one Premier to give us their opinion.”

Johnson: “Bottom line?”

The researcher glances around furtively. Finally, he speaks.

Researcher: “Well, of all the groups we tested, the response to Premier was just about uniform.”

Johnson’s right hand man sees that no one wants to fess up.

Finally, he says, “They all said they tasted like shit.”

Johnson: “Like shit???”

Researcher: “Shit was the consensus, yes sir.”

The story goes on with an inquiry by Johnson as to the current total investment in the development of Premier. About $350 million.

Johnson’s reaction?: “$350 million and we developed a turd with a tip.”

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

The big game has come and gone. I’m reading and hearing more about the advertising in the postmortem than about the game itself.

Seems that the auto ads were the big hits, along with the Budweiser singing cowboys.

And seems that the Groupon ad with Timothy Hutton was the big loser.

Mr. Hutton opens with a soliloquy about the suffering people of Tibet. Then, as the camera pulls back, he says, “but they still make an amazing fish curry.” (Fish curry? Tibet? Who knew?) He then tells how Groupon members are saving big at a Tibetan restaurant.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

When I heard the line about the fish curry, I winced. From suffering people to fish curry? Pretty improbable leap.

The outcry about the commercial has been intense.

And, it appears, that Groupon had no intention to offend.  A visit to Groupon’s site relating to the ad (www.savethemoney.groupon.com) suggests that Groupon meant the ad to be humorous. Indeed, Groupon is supporting social causes as indicated on their site.

My guess is that the ad aired with no real-world testing. I’ve seen it happen over and over. The ad agency comes up with a “great idea”. They pitch it to their client’s leadership. They’re convinced. The campaign is commissioned and aired. Test it with the target audience? No! It’s brilliant. We get it, therefore they’ll get it.

Besides, it takes time and money to test.

Let’s see:

$5-$6 million to air the commercial (once).

$3-$4 million (or more) to make the commercial.

$100,000 to test the ad.

Yes, great idea. Let’s skip the test.

In the end, damage done–priceless!

Test, Test, Test! No excuses.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Image via Wikipedia

Market Researchers generally occupy a world of perceptions, opinions, demographics, psychographics, and preferences, driven extensively by psychological or sociological thought paradigms. And sometimes we get caught up in the language of our specialization, particularly statistics.

We live in a world of probabilities, where findings and conclusions are caveated with statistical significance or likelihoods and where often the language reflects uncertainty.

Often, however, the clients we serve do not live in such a world. They have to make decisions, expend the company’s monies, take risks, and assume revenue responsibility. Imagine then their frustration when they hear researchers hem and haw about on the one hand, but then again on the other, or that this course of action might produce a certain results, but a different course might produce different results, which might be worse or better. We don’t know; we can only estimate the probabilities.

Please, please, don’t write me saying that issuing such warnings are part of our job and our responsibilities. I fully understand that.

What I am suggesting is that researchers would have more effectiveness if we better understood the nature of the decisions facing our clients. In other words, what is their bottom line?

Often that bottom line is a go-no go decision or a this-one-not-that-one decision on product development, marketing strategies and campaigns, investments, or resource allocation.

And here, we are armed and dangerous, so to speak, in understanding and using the fundamental statistical measures of Type I and Type II error.

From Wikipedia:

A table as follows can be useful in understanding the concepts.

Null Hypothesis (H0) is true   Alternative Hypothesis (H1) is true

Fail to Reject Null Hypothesis                                      Right decision                             Wrong decision

Type II Error

False Negative

Reject Null Hypothesis                                                 Wrong decision

Type I Error

False Positive

Right decision

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors

Thus armed, in our next discussion, I will explore the translation of Type I and Type II error into the language of the bottom line.

Comments welcome.

More to follow.

Dr. Bob

Amid all the clatter declaring market research dead is a growing perception that phone calls, and requisite phone surveys, are going the way of tape back-up drives and floppy disks.

Not so fast, says the Economist newspaper, in a January 1 article titled “Hanging Up.”

Mobile web and text messaging may be growing rapidly, especially among the young, but voice calls persist, and indeed, the number of minutes spent on phone calls per month has grown by almost one-third between 2004 and 2009.

Teenagers in America clearly love text messaging, as the rapid growth in text messages per month attests. While American youth has gleefully adopted th

e pc as their own, they are also spending more and more time with television. Perhaps, as the Economist notes, “an old form of communication may stage a comeback in a different form. Skype, the internet phone service, is growing rapidly. In the first half of 2010 users racked up 95 billion minutes in voice and video calls.”

It seems clear, at least for the immediate future, that phone calls, and phone surveys, are alive and well. True, market researchers will have to adapt to multi-modal methodologies and the issues currently being addressed about random sampling and representativeness.

Remember the old truism that high-tech necessitates high-touch? Phone surveys with live interviewers might just fit the bill well into the future.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

As researchers, we tend to talk statistics. Even if we are cautious in our use of statistical jargon, we certainly tend to rely on statistics to draw our conclusions.

While every b-school grad, and many managers, has been schooled in stats, stats are not the common language of business, especially not the   c-suite. Those who truly run the business, those who make the decisions, speak the language of the bottom line, the financial bottom line that is.

Researchers, and marketers in general, are more comfortable with the lingo of marketing and statistics. Unfortunately, I have observed, and early in my career was frequently guilty of myself, that market researchers can easily assume that it is enough to present the statistics a market research study had generated. Certainly, management would get it. After all, they were………management. I made the connections of how the research results related to the customers, to the business. Surely, they did as well.

Take a customer satisfaction tracking study.

I would present the scores, the Top Two Box, the Bottom Two, I would show the trend over time, I would show the regression co-efficients and the weights of the factors associated with overall satisfaction, willingness to recommend, willingness to re-buy and the like. I would even go so far as to suggest areas of the business that needed improvement, from a customer perspective.

As often as not (and truthfully more so), management would politely listen, ask a few questions, and not be seen or heard from again until it was time for the next quarterly review of the findings.

Frustrating? You bet!

It was not until I learned to speak in the language of the bottom line that polite listening began to turn be replaced by more and more action and implementation.

More to follow.

Comments welcome!

Dr. Bob