Of Robots and Consumers

Robots do wonderful things. They dispose of bombs and take care of other dangerous things us mortals would rather not do. They also vacuum your home if you have a roomba.  All well and good unless they are calling your house! The recent controversy in Canada over the use of robo dialing to influence the election by annoying the [...]

Why a Crackdown on Rogue Market Research in Canada is Hard to Imagine

While the industry remains largely healthy in Canada, it is under considerable pressure to define and enforce standards. What is now playing out (partially, in the press) reflects the fundamental tension evident in new ways of doing things as well as the difficulty of self-regulating industry associations to deal with change. Yet another news article [...]

Collaboration and the Art of Business

Business is ruthless. Business is ultra competitive. Business is about winning. It is all of these things until it is not. Sometimes it is about collaboration, about working outside of the box, about doing something together. There is always risk involved in collaboration and it not the right approach for everyone. That said, small companies [...]

We Overvalue Norms… in Market Research and in Life

As a society we value norms — how is something compared with the “normal”. School starts it off but throughout our lives we seem to find ways to comparing ourselves to some normal. Even online we have developed measures of how we are doing relative to some standard (see klout). When we reduce ourselves to [...]

With Do-it-Yourself Options There is No Excuse Not to Understand Your Customers

In the past several months I have worked with organizations who have, gasp, collected their own survey data using Survey Monkey. In one case, I was able to offer input into the design and in the other I came in after the data was already collected. Other professional market researchers may scoff at the use [...]