The current COVID 19 virus pandemic has altered the living, working, and buying behaviors of customers in almost every industry and product/service category. While many of these changes are driven by business closures, social distancing, and other, hopefully, short-term practices, some of the effects may become permanent.   People who rarely cooked are spending more […]

Consumers make many decisions before purchasing a product or service. They decide: How much and what kind of information they need to make a purchase How they will obtain information about their options If they will comparison shop or not When they will make their purchase How they will make their purchase Where they will […]

Many companies measure and track customer satisfaction via Net Promoter Score or another type of satisfaction instrument. While these tools are effective at determining satisfaction levels and tracking changes over time, they typically do not identify what is actually driving customer satisfaction. We often use Kano analysis to reveal those drivers. It considers both the […]

Presently, it seems like everyone is involved in innovation. What most people discover is that more than just a good idea is needed to realize success. Innovation must be grounded in human needs, competitive in the current market, and profitable. Market research can help in all of these areas, from identifying unmet user needs, to […]

I'm just a soul whose intentions are good Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.  (Animals) Generations receive a great deal of attention from social scientists and marketers. They are often, however, broadly characterized and sometimes misunderstood. Fueling or implying these generational stereotypes in your marketing, communications, or organizational processes can hurt your employee engagement, […]

Four Factors that Most Impact Online Survey Completion Rates Survey fatigue is a real thing.  Marketers and researchers operating in the B2B world and niche consumer markets are often challenged to reach their sample goals.  Maximizing completion rates (number of participants who pass through the qualifying screening questions and then complete the survey) is one way […]

When business planning for 2018, did you invest resources in updating your organization’s market analysis? Prioritizing this work regularly, even annually, can pay off in market share, revenue, and profitability. Often, when an owner launches a business or an executive joins a company, she will spend a great deal of time analyzing the market, customers, […]

As those eager students head back to school to build their skills in reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic, it may be a good time for you to review your own branding 3 Rs.  For many organizations, those key metrics are Recognition, Reputation and Recall.  While these are often critical goals from a brand’s perspective and excellent […]

Whenever we engage our panel to ask what improvements we—as the panel management team—could make to improve their experience, one of the suggestions we nearly always receive is, “Stop asking me for the same information on every survey.” If you maintain your own customer panels or have conducted panel-based research in the past, you’ll likely […]

For Midwesterners, spring is often the time we start thinking about improvements to our homes. So we recently polled our Iowa Opinion Panel to see what changes or repairs they were considering this year and discovered several interesting findings. First off, a whopping 90% of those who report being able to make improvements to their […]