Category: The MR Business

  For about the last 25 years or so I like to pronounce with boring regularity that the survey business (and by extension the research business) is increasingly about smart, strategic use of IT. In that vein I have reproduced below CIO Magazine’s Top 10 IT Stories of 2008. They have better graphics. It’s the…

In 1987, to commemorate its 50th anniversary, The Public Opinion Quarterly asked 16 well-known scholars and survey practitioners to offer their visions of the future of public opinion research. In his response, Harold Mendelsohn described how “. . . the eventual ‘computerizing’ of the American home undoubtedly will contribute significantly to the speed, accuracy, and…

The June issue of Inside Research reports that an online poll by YouGov matched the final results of the May 2 London mayoralty elections exactly.   Not only was it right on, it was the only major poll to show Ken Livingston, the eventual loser at 47 percent, behind.  Everyone else had him winning.  I will…

Day 2 of The Road to the Client Congress brought a bit more insight.  We were joined by Bob Groves, Director of the Survey Research Center of UM and arguably one of the smartest and most influential survey methdologists on the planet.  His name tag was the only one with a title on it ("Prof");…

I am in Chicago at a mini-conference called The Road to the Client Congress.  The conference has been organized by Bob Lederer who, among other things, publishes an MR trade rag called The Research Business Report.  This all started back in the fall of 2006 when Bob managed to tap into what he perceives as…

I recently saw an interesting report on a survey of "MR Professionals" by MarketResearchCareers.  I can’t judge the validity of the survey because it costs money to see it, but for what it’s worth here are its lead findings: About one-third of US MR suppliers are offshoring work. Of these 55 percent were satisfied with…

There is a really interesting article in the December issue of Research World co-authored by "holistic" research guru DVL Smith.  In it he sets out the five skills we need to train into our staffs for them to be able to deliver the actionable research required in today’s MR environment.    The five are: The…

A couple of weeks back I attended the CASRO Data Collection Conference, not a bad place to get a feel for current thinking in the industry. Three things of significance seem to be on people’s minds: Worries about data quality or more accurately what to do about it, continue to occupy people’s thinking. (There is…

It’s hard to go to an MR conference these days without at least one presentation about Web 2.0.  Everyone seems to agree that MR needs to find a way to use user-generated content that is the staple of Web 2.0 but the industry continues to struggle with how best to do that.  For some examples…

Theo Downes-LeGuin has sent the following email which I have copied and pasted below. I returned last night from 3 days at IIR’s "The Market Research Event" (thankfully they no longer render "The" in all-caps). I hope the following observations are useful:   I’ve been to 5 years of this conference and while I didn’t…