Category Archives: Market research industry

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.

Catching up with the Joneses

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gold colored figure among a sea of white figures

Do we really need to saturate the market research supplier field with lookalikes, where every firm is a “full, end-to-end service” firm but without any real differentiation?

Z’s IIeX NA 2018 Memory Book

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 »

What ONE skill do you need to succeed in market research?

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 »

Why do YOU love market research?

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 »

In the end, aren’t we all “suppliers”?

Client: a person or organization using the services of a lawyer or other professional person or company. I’ve lately been pursuing other things (read: I’ve been ridiculously busy) and haven’t been taking the time to keep up on the happenings in the broader market research community. I forgot how much I enjoyed that, how much I enjoyed reading and participating… 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 »

Survey replacements – are they really ready?

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 »

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 »