Tag Archives: market research

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 »

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 »

Market research self-reflection

In the past year, two main items have come forward that has caused me, at least, to step back and reflect a bit on the market research industry as a whole. The first item: an article about reproducing psychology studies and how those replicated studies produced different results than the originals. The second item: an article about a bug in… Read more »

Give them conferences, too!

Last year, Annie Pettit wrote a blog post that, frankly, has been on my mind ever since. The post was titled simply, “Where are the millennials of market research?” Depending on the date range for millennials being used, I’m either GenX or I’m a millennial. I’m also in a somewhat senior role with my company. This has caused me to… Read more »

Reporting: the client’s and supplier’s struggles

My life has been currently taken up by reporting. I’m living it and breathing it, and so it’s on my mind a lot. A few things that have been running through my mind: the difference between reporting and storytelling; finding the sweet spot between just updating a tracker report and looking for the story being told this time from the… Read more »

How do you decide it’s time for change?

Have you ever stopped at a stop light and wondered when it was that we decided that a red light hanging over a street meant we needed to stop? Or have you ever looked at lines on a road, and wondered when we started recognizing them as barriers to be crossed or not crossed? This got me thinking: are there… Read more »

Could this be why suppliers aren’t generating better insights?

Clients and suppliers both share plenty of woes when it comes to market research. Both are trying to do more with less – less money and time, to be exact. Both are faced with increasing demands, too – more insights, better insights, more actionable insights, better stories. I’ve read plenty of articles talking about how to get better insights; how… Read more »

Should market researchers be consultants?

If you’ve seen tweets or posts from various market research conferences the past few months, you know that one of the themes that has been making the rounds is that of market researchers needing to be more consultative. This, for me, has begged the question: do we really?

Because I’m a market researcher…(my adds)

Annie Pettit posted a blog post on Peanut Labs’ blog in October called, “Because I’m a marketing researcher…” It got me thinking what things I do differently because of market research. So, without further ado, here’s my addition to her list.