Category Archives: Marketing Research

Interview-Podcast w/ Jim Novo

Analytical Culture, Analytics Education, Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Lab Store, Marketing / Tech Interface, Marketing Research, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

Friend and fellow blogger Alan Rimm-Kaufman spent some of his valuable time asking my opinion on various online marketing issues in a far-ranging interview and podcast.

We met in person for the first time doing a presentation together at the DMA show in Chicago this fall, and because he used to work at Crutchfield – a truly customer-driven remote retailer – we share some experiences and beliefs.

For those of you who might be wondering where a lot of the Marketing Productivity ideas I post here come from, this interview-podcast is probably a pretty good backgrounder.  We talk about a lot of stuff, including:

Monetizing customer experience

Importance of Control Groups / Source Attribution

Multichannel Marketing Strategy

LifeCycle Contact Strategy versus Calendar-based

Retail Business Models / Lab Store

Search box or not? / Serendipity

How to tell if online customers are really engaged – without web analytics

Here’s another link to the Interview-Podcast.  Enjoy! 

That was lots of fun, thanks Allen!

Al Gore & Warren Buffet: Marketing Gurus

Analytical Culture, Marketing Research

Um, following up on the post Research for Press Release, we have this gem from eMarketer and Anderson Analytics, who apparently did not even read the results of the survey they conducted.

Some highlights from this group of “Senior Marketers”:

Most important thing they are concentrating on:

Mastering the Basics

Seems unusual for Senior Marketers, to me.  

My guess: the members of MENG are not Senior Marketers, and should not be referred to as such.  Of course, nobody would pay attention to a press release about a survey on a “bunch of pukes”; this is the Source of Sample problem.

Asking “which demographic segment is most important to target” generically without supplying the product to be marketed is a ridiculous concept.  “Senior Marketers” probably wouldn’t even answer this question.

And the biggest gut-splitter: the list of “Most Important Marketing Gurus” includes Al Gore & Warren Buffet.  Now, these are both smart gents in their own ways but I’m not aware of their status as Marketing Gurus.

Of course, an alternative reality is possible: the members of MENG are Senior Marketers.  If that’s the case, I simply don’t know what to say, other than Marketing has probably already Deconstucted.  Or Imploded.  Or something worse.

You can learn a lot more from this really useful Research for Press Release (RFPR?) piece here.

Comments?

More Tips on Evaluating Research

Analytical Culture, Analytics Education, Marketing Research

To continue with this previous post…other things to look for when evaluating research:

Discontinuous Sample – I don’t know if there is a scientific word for this (experts, go ahead and comment if so), but what I am referring to here is the idea of setting out the parameters of a sample and then sneaking in a subset of the sample where the original parameters are no longer true.  This is extremely popular in press about research.

Example:  A statement is made at the beginning of the press release regarding the population surveyed.  Then, without blinking an eye, they start to talk about the participants, leaving you to believe the composition of participants reflects the original population.  In most cases, this is nuts, especially when you are talking about sending an e-mail to 8000 customers and 100 answer the survey. 

Sometimes it works the other way, they will slip in something like, “50% of the participants said the main focus of their business was an e-commerce site”, which does not in any way imply that 50% of the population (4000 of 8000) are in the e-commerce business.  Similarly, if you knew what percent of the 8000 were in the e-commerce business, then you could get some feeling for whether the participant group of 100 was biased towards e-commerce or not.

Especially in press releases, watch out for these closely-worded and often intentional slights of hand describing the actual segments of participants.  They are often written using language that can be defended as a “misunderstanding” and often you can find the true composition of participants in the source documentation to prove your point. 

The response to your digging and questioning of the company putting out the research will likely be something like, “the press misunderstood the study”, but at least you will know what the real definitions of the segments are.

Get the Questions – if a piece of research really seems to be important to your company and you are considering purchasing it, make sure the full report contains all the research questions. 

I can’t tell you how many times I have matched up the survey data with the sequencing and language of the questions and found bias built right into the survey.  Creating (and administering, for that matter) survey questions and sequencing them is a scientific endeavor all by itself.  There are known pitfalls and ways to do it correctly, and people who do research for a living understand all of this.  It’s very easy to get this part of the exercise wrong and it can fundamentally affect the survey results.

So, in summary, go ahead and “do research” by e-mailing customers or popping up questionnaires, or read about research in the press, but realize there is a whole lot more going on in statistically significant, actionable research than meets the eye, and most of the stuff you read in the press in nothing more than a Focus Group.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with a Focus Group, as long as you realize that is what you have.