Category: The MR Business
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A Literary Digest moment
Last week McKinsey released results from a study of the impact of US healthcare reform (The Affordable Care Act) on employer-provided health insurance. The report estimated that 78 million workers were likely to lose their employer provided health insurance once the law kicks in fully in 2014. This estimate is significantly at odds with other…
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FTC vs. MR: A Fight to the Death?
That's at least what Quirk's email newsletter is telling me today. So what's the fuss? Something called the Best Practices Act (HR 5777), also known simply as "The Rush Bill." MRA has been sounding the alarm about this bill for some months now, and while I'm not a regular reader of Quirk's I gather that…
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Let’s ban the R word
While working on a paper over the weekend it suddenly hit me that "necessary but not sufficient" is the perfect way to describe the whole array of techniques that have emerged over the last few years in the name of improving panel data quality. Not to be confused with the Goldratt "business novel" (now there's…
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Still feeling our way
In my last post I promised some short updates on the just-concluded ESOMAR Congress in Athens. Then my family and I set off on a driving vacation around the Peloponnese where thoughts of MR and the Congress quickly drifted away. I was reminded of this when the morning's email included a note from a colleague…
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Privacy continues be a major issue for our industry
This the first of what I hope to be a (short) series of posts from the ESOMAR Congress in Athens. The theme, not surprisingly, is Odyssey: The Changing Face of Market Research. The change part of that tile refers to the double challenge of (1) an onslaught of new methods and (2) the still difficult…
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More signs of the Apolcalypse
Way back in the last century when Web interviewing was just starting to warm up more than one researcher worried that with the Web as a research medium anybody could create and field a survey. You didn't need a mail room, a call center, or a field force anymore. In 1999, those fears were made…
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Hoisted on their own petard
The current issue of Inside Research is out and it includes the mid-year update on online spending. Despite the headline that characterizes the growth as "soft" the numbers show the MR companies reporting to IR (and mine is one) estimating that their 2010 revenues from online will be around $2.2 billion, a 12 percent increase…
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Summer fun
Ray Pointer has initiated a fun little discussion in the NewMR group on Linkedin. The topic is, "Cautionary tales for market researchers" and invites examples of failures of MR to help new researchers "develop a fully rounded awareness" of what we do. The classic (no pun intended) example for most of us is the New…
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ISO Certified Companies Surge in Honimichl Top 50!
The title of today's post is a prediction. That's also how Tom Anderson starts a post on his blog under the title, "CASRO ISO Certification Fails!" Here I pause, as the newsies do, to disclose that I am a member of the CIRQ Advisory Board—the nonprofit that CASRO set up to manage the ISO certification…