AMSRS; data visualization; and more! Time for a Friday Five!

Friday Five!
It’s Friday! One of the things I enjoyed doing in a previous role was a review of articles that caught my interest in the previous week called the Friday Five. Let’s look at what’s been talked about in the world of market research this week!

The Colors of Motion

This site came across my feed this week, and it’s gorgeous. While it might seem to have a tenuous-at-best tie to market research, what caught my attention was the fact this is a seemingly simple way to look at movies in a completely novel way. Charlie Clark has taken movies, and frame by frame, a php script is run to extract the average color for each frame. What’s left is an image made up of lines of color. It’s fascinating to see movies in this way. What’s even more fascinating is that each image is interactive – click on it to see individual frames, click on the grid view to see just that – a grid view of the colors. This made me wonder at outside-the-box ideas for visualizing market research data. What if we were to assign colors to sentiment and create a color map of feedback from a focus group or from open-ended questions in a survey?

The Naughties – a decade of change for the #mrx industry — WIPQR Talks Blog

Victoria Gamble shares her experience in market research in the first decade of this millenium, from 2001 – 2010. I related a lot to her post because my own market research career started in that same decade. My start was as an online survey programmer, so I largely bypassed the world of managing phone or paper surveys, instead starting in what I see no as the middle of online survey methodology becoming more mainstream in market research. My own first reports were in Word (I was so proud of the template I ended up creating for clients’ reports!), and I forgot Facebook started in that decade, seeing as how ubiquitous it’s become since then!

Unicorns, ukuleles, and, yes, useful learnings — Lucy Blakemore

The Australian Market and Social Research Society conference was held recently, and I really enjoyed following the #AMSRS hashtag on Twitter. (I told my family I was attending virtually via Twitter.) I really enjoyed reading summaries from the conference, and Lucy Blakemore’s summary is no exception. Check out her summary for great links and takeaways from the conference!

Is fixing your survey worse than being naked in front of strangers? — Market Research Association blog

Annie Pettit shares a life metaphor on the difficulty of doing something that can feel terribly uncomfortable, but, with practice, becomes if not second nature, at least loses the discomfort. She artfully compares it to taking a step back and cutting up long surveys into shorter, more manageable surveys that are also more likely to get good responses. This came at a time when I was doing exactly what she talks about – cutting a long survey into a much shorter version. In my case, I wasn’t as tied to the survey as the original survey author was, which made it easier for me to hack away at it. Her takeaway message is sweet and simple: it will be painful to do at first, but just try it a few times, and you’ll find yourself losing that agonizing feeling over cutting up that 30-minute survey.

Data scientists to CEOs – You can’t handle the truth — Venture Beat

If you haven’t been there, you will be at some point: presenting what you feel is compelling results from a study that management just isn’t listening to or implementing. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon, and it’s frustrating to walk away feeling like you’re showing either a huge opportunity that upper management doesn’t feel it’s the right time to take (thought your data say otherwise) or that a program or campaign isn’t working but upper management perhaps feels they’ve invested too much into for them to simply pull the plug (though your data say it’s doing more harm than good). This is a great call to companies to generate a culture of being open to whatever the data may say, being openly curious, willing to be impartial to the data, so that those doing the research will continue to provide the full results, not just the watered-down, not-so-uncomfy-to-hear results.

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