Category Archives: Best Practice

The (sluggish) speed of insights

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I know it’s been quite some time, but some conversations recently have re-energized my passion for making waves in this industry that used to be called Market Research, sometimes still is, but to make ourselves feel more current, we’ve now started referring to ourselves as being “in insights.” As maybe you can tell, I’m feeling a modicum of frustration with… Read more »

Reflection, Resources, and the Future of MRXplorer

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.

The blog goes pod (and digital nomad thoughts)

I published my first podcast a few weeks ago! It’s short, hopefully both entertaining and thought-provoking. You can find the episode titled Digital nomadery and market research on Anchor, and eventually on all podcast services. In fact, I think it’s hit all of the services by now (iTunes, PocketCast, etc.). However, completely unscientific Twitter survey says most would rather read… Read more »

Mobile and Market Research

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I’m going to eventually write a post about my 18-month journey to taking a tracker from mobile unfriendly to device consistent. That’s not this post. This post is about the terminology being used when discussing surveys that are being adapted for mobile and a lesson I’ve recently learned about how we use these terms thinking we all understand each other,… Read more »

Z at the zoo: a shift in perspective

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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 »

3 ways we fail our audiences and how to turn the ship around

Before I get going, I want to start by defining “audiences.” In this context, the audiences in question are those who we are asking to participate in our market research studies. Typically, the failure is happening with quantitative studies, not qualitative studies (at least, in my experience, this is the case). In quantitative surveys, we find bloated surveys, biz-speak language,… Read more »

Why are we failing our audiences?

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 »

How my 5th-grade self made my report writing easier

In elementary/primary school, most of us are taught the wonderful lesson about how to write a five-paragraph essay. Here are the basic steps: Decide on a theme; write your thesis statement. Gather data related to your theme. Filter the data gathered to identify topics related to your theme. Create your outline for the essay. Based on the outline, write your… Read more »

Quallie and Quantie: a love story

Once upon a time, there lived two individuals who seemed to have completely opposite personalities: Quallie and Quantie. Nobody thought they’d get along together well. Quantie was all about numbers and could sometimes come across as really boring to listen to, though occasionally, there were nuggets of gold hidden among all the numbers Quantie shared. Quantie could also come across… Read more »

6 common survey writing errors to avoid

trim a survey

Writing survey questions can seem like a walk in the park until you realize how many ways there are to do it poorly. From leading questions to hitting a double-header in just one question, there are a number of things to watch for when putting together your survey questions. Bias I’ll touch on this briefly because I have a full… Read more »