We’ve been doing a lot of learning, listening, and self-evaluating the past few weeks with the renewed emphasis on systemic racism in the world. We wanted to share some of our fledgling thoughts and actions, and our decision for where this podcast is going to focus next.
A few years ago, I started this blog and started becoming active on Twitter (@zontziry), where I quickly found the hashtags #mrx and #newmr, and I connected with and was continually inspired by market research influencers like Annie Pettit, Jeffrey Henning, Ray Poynter, JD Deitch, Kristin Luck, Lenny Murphy, and many more. I was new on the Twitter scene, new… Read more »
If you had to cite ONE skill that market researchers need to be successful long-term, what would it be? Knowing how to discover someone’s actual business question? Consulting? Analytics? Big data? Here’s my answer: learning. I recently listened to someone talk about shifting their organization from IQ to EQ to LQ: intelligence to emotion to learning. He described the way… Read more »
Did you know not all market research is created equal? Of course you did. But did you know that not all market research ROLES are created equal? I’ve been considering this lately as I’ve been evaluating my career, what I’ve done, what I want to do, what drives my passion. Like so many others in market research, I happened upon… Read more »
A few weekends ago, I decided to take my son to the zoo. Now that he’s old enough to actually appreciate seeing all the animals, it was a total blast watching his excitement over just about every animal there. We took our time at various exhibits, tried to follow the map to get to the exhibits he wanted to see… Read more »
I was recently part of a marketing training class where the teacher answered a question about surveys being conducted to garner audience perceptions and experiences with, “Stop doing surveys! Everyone who takes them lies.” Of course, being me, I offered, “Well, now that you’ve obliterated my profession, what do you propose we do to collect that information?” His answer was… Read more »
I was just reading a couple of posts from March about how we are not doing well by our research participants. First, there was Annie Pettit’s post about how we sometimes use YouTube videos to help make a point in a presentation — without asking for permission from the original poster first. Second was an article by Melanie Courtwright on… Read more »
I recently had the opportunity to work on and present a topline report. After all my writing and reading about storytelling in the market research field, I found myself really having to reconcile finding and telling a story for a tracker, instead of just presenting data. To add to that, I was doing my best to align with a sister… Read more »
I recently learned in a staff meeting that the marketing research team was meeting with a group of their clients, discussing the plans for the coming year. One of the big questions for one of the trackers: are we even measuring the right metric any more? I don’t know the details of what happened, except that, at one point, the… Read more »
Scenario: client is meeting with market research professionals. “I have this website that I think is posing issues to our visitors. I want to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Can we do a survey? That’s what I have budget for…” Reaction #1: Market research professional grumbles internally about lack of budgets these days and wonders what good a… Read more »