A Life Lesson Market Research Taught Me

Due to the final exams and my trip back to China (where you cannot access WordPress, so so sad), this might be my last post for 2012. To give 2012 a nice and meaningful closing, I decided to write about a life lesson market research taught me.

Life is full of ups and downs, just like a kid’s mood. Sometimes I feel I’m so powerful that I can solve any problem, but sometimes I feel so useless like nothing. As a researcher, I tried to solve this problem and keep a good balance of my mood. I started my “research” by analyzing the pattern of my “downs”: I realized almost all of them happened when I found I cannot do something well, especially not as well as somebody else can. Because of the “failure”, I started to question myself: my capability, my interpersonal relationship, my everything… Then I felt awful, and before realizing it I was already in the “pessimistic chasm”. Obviously, to keep things from going all the way wrong, I need to figure out why the feeling of “failure” can give me such dramatic negative influence. See, the research question emerged by itself! (I knew this sounds kinda crazy, but please bear with me for a sec. We are almost there for the life lesson!)

No one likes the feeling of “I cannot do something well’. However, individuals’ opinion on “failure” varies. We all know that “failure is the mother of success”, but when YOU are facing a “failure”, it’s way too hard to remind yourself it’s not a big deal. That’s exactly the reason why the “old me” was beaten so hardly by “failures”. Nevertheless, just like all kinds of research methods have their native defects and inevitable errors, fault and failure is an inherent part of life. Also like research, positive mood and life can be generalized into 5 keywords: Variation, Selection, Trail, Error and Correction.

In my point of view, variation is the essential beauty of the world. Market research exists because of the diversity among a population. Same for our lives: everyone in your life is different, every single approach to solve a problem is different, YOU become different in every minute. It is wonderful if you select the “right” one, thing or approach at your first try, BUT it’s not always the case, and please remember it’s also not NECESSARY. We might have to face the “errors”, but at most of time, we also have opportunities and right to correct it! We felt so bad when we were in the middle of the process, but after it was done, we looked back, and realized we learned so much.

Below is a TED talk that inspired me with the ideas in this post. If you are experiencing a bad mood or feeling confused and vulnerable, I highly recommend you to watch it.

A future market researcher’s closing words for 2012: Please enjoy the process of Variation, Selection, Trial, Error & Correction! Just as we can always optimize a research, we can also choose to be brave and optimize our lives! 

Market Research as a Career: Three Types of Audience

As a market researcher, one major and important job is to deliver research results and corresponding recommendations to the clients. It includes both written and oral communication: writing research reports and giving final presentation. After you did all the background research, sampling, interview, data analysis, etc., now is the time to show your clients what you found. In my opinion, whether you can succeed in this final step highly depend on how much do you know about your “audience”.

Obviously, the audience is your client. No matter what kind of research you do or what problems you are asked to solve, there are three typical types of people who will review and use your deliverables from the client side.  I call them “End-user”, “Technician” and “Financer”.

Market researchers must be aware of the 3 types of audience and their distinct demands.

As shown in the diagram, these 3 types of audience are different in their roles and expertise. Therefore, their focuses on market researchers’ presentation are also  distinct. Regularly, these 3 types of audience won’t be all shown up in a presentation, but sometimes they do attend the meeting together. So, the question is how a market researcher can satisfy all 3 kinds of audience in a single presentation?

The End-Users: They are usually from C-suite, like the CEOs, CMOs, or CCOs (Chief Customer Officer). They are super busy and have a lot of things in mind when digesting the messages from the presentation. Sometimes, they might join the presentation after the researcher has talked for a while, which made the situation even more challenging. However, what they expect from the presentation can be simply generalized into one question: “How can it help my vision?” They care more about the key findings and the interpretations than the data source and research process. So, make sure these key messages appear several times in the presentation, at least at the beginning as a executive summary and at the end as a summary.  If they miss those information at the beginning, they still have chance to know it somewhere else.

The Technicians: They are usually the in-house market researchers or research staff from PR/Advertising agencies that also work with your client. I call them “technicians” because they can do research by themselves, which means they know all the skills and techniques about sampling, research design, data analysis, etc. They are at the presentation to check and “question” your methodology. Therefore, we should make sure we prepare the information that they want. However, we may not explain it a lot in the presentation, especially when the “end-users” are also in the meeting. The preparation I mentioned include two things: a comprehensive research report and the anticipation of research-method-related questions in the Q&A session after the presentation.  Before you start presenting, you can explain that due to the time limit, the details of research process won’t be include in the presentation, but if the audience want to know more about it, they can get the information from the comprehensive research report or ask you in the Q&A session.

The Financiers:  They are usually the CFOs or account managers from the PR/Advertising agencies that also work for your client. The only thing they care about in the presentation is how feasible the research findings and recommendations from  finance viewpoint. In other words, what are the ROIs for the marketing strategies you suggest according to your research findings? If it is a presentation for request for proposal (RFP), then you need to show the total budget for the research and the breakdowns.

If you take into the distinct demands of the 3 types of audience in mind when giving the presentation, you are halfway to success! Hope this post is helpful to you and I’m more than happy to hear your opinion!

How Deep is My Love to Market Research? Ask My New iPad Mini!

I am really exciting today since I finally received my new iPad Mini!

If you have been a reader of this blog for a while, you may tell I’m not simply taking market research as a major or career,  I LOVE IT WITH MY FULL HEART! If you don’t believe what I said, simply check out the picture below : )

This iPad Mini Belongs to a Crazy Market Researcher!

LOL : b

Market Research Methods 101: Level of Measurement

The “Market Research Methods 101″ series is back! Today I’ll introduce the last but not least of “The Three Musketeers” in the market research world: Level of Measurement. If you have read my posts for the first two “musketeers”, you should know that I love the weight scale example (hope you also like it). It helped me explain the concepts of validity and reliability and will help you and me understand what level of measure ment in just a minute. But before that, let’s review what validity and reliability are.

Validity: the weight scale is accurately showing the weight, not showing it in a wrong way, not showing anything else

Reliability: you stood on the scale 3 times, and you got the same number of your weight 3 times.

So how can we understand level of measurement by the same example? In real life, some girls can be really strict with their weight. They feel horrible by gaining mere 1 pounds. Therefore, they would like to measure their weight as accurately as possible. They don’t want the scale simply show it’s about “100 pounds”. They want to clearly know whether it’s exactly “100″ pounds or it’s actually “102″ pounds. Here comes level of measurement, which shows how accurately we are measuring a concept. In market research, there are 4 levels of measurement: Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, and Ratio. Let me take the measurement of income as an example to further explain the 4 levels. I’ll first give your the measurements, so you can try to find the differences by yourself before I introduce them in detail.

Nominal: Is your family’s annual income over 50,000?   A. Yes    B. No

Ordinal: How do you describe your family’s annual income status?  A. Low-income  B. Middle-income  C. High-income

Interval: Ratings on a continuous 1-10 scale (1=very low and 10=very high), where do you think your family’s annual income fall in?

Ratio: Approximately, what is your family’s annual income? _________

Here I borrowed Dr. Philip Hodgson‘s approach to explain the 4 levels of measurement. Each level of measurement is characterized by its properties. Nominal measurement has just one property:CLASSIFICATION. Ordinal measurement has two properties: CLASSIFICATION and ORDER. Interval measurement has three properties: CLASSIFICATION, ORDER and EQUAL INTERVALS. Ratio data has four properties: CLASSIFICATION, ORDER, EQUAL INTERVALS and TRUE ZERO. Because the higher levels of measurement contain more properties and more information, they permit a wider variety of interpretations. For this reason, as a market researcher, we should always keep the following rule in mind: Always assign the highest permissible level of measurement to a given set of observations.

An Interview with an Experienced Market Research Professor

Another video interview about different people’s perception of market research! This time, I interviewed one of my professor who teaches market research proposal writing and presentation skills at Boston University. He is also an extremely experienced market researcher with more than 40 years experience, serving as the CEO at HawkPartners, a boutique consulting firm that helps clients make fact-based decisions to guide their marketing and brand strategies.

Sorry again about my bad camera video recording skills, but I think you will like the content : )

Market Research Methods 101: What is Reliability?

The series of Market Research Methods 101 continues! Today we are going to discuss another basic but crucial concept: Reliability.

Before we head to today’s theme, let’s review the relevant concept, validity, which I introduced in my last post. In the context of market research, validity means that when you want to a specific topic or idea, you are exactly measuring what you are supposed to measure and do not include anything else. Going back to my favorite weight scale example, if you are 100% sure your bathroom weight scale can accurately shows your weight, than we can say the scale is valid. Then how can the scale example shed light on what reliability is? Here we go! Let’s assume you keep the good habit of measuring your weight 3 times a day by your bathroom weight scale. In the morning, the weight shows that you are 100 pounds; at noon, it says 80 pounds; in the evening, you stand on the scale the third time and this time you found your “weight” is 120 pounds. If so, do you think your bathroom weight scale is reliable?

Of course not. We know that, regularly, it’s impossible for one’s weight to fluctuate dramatically within a day. Therefore, the three weight giving by the scale should be consistent. If not, then we can tell it is lack of reliability. With respect to market research methods, since currently most of market research still relies on the self-report approach and we all know human beings are extremely complicated and sometimes capricious (well, it hurts but it’s true), it is especially important to evaluate whether the answers to a survey by a respondent is reliable. Well, the core question is, HOW?

Actually, the answer is already in the weight scale example. An easy way to identify lack of reliability is to see whether a respondent’s reply to the same question is consistent. When designing a survey, for a specific concept that we would like to measure, we can intentionally set multiple-item measures at different places in a questionnaire. Therefore, after we collect all the data and information, we are able to see the consistency of a respondents in terms of a specific idea. However, when design multiple-item measures, you don’t want to simply repeat the same question with different words. Remember, human beings are not as constant as rocks, every single detail on a survey will influence their minds, which may prevent them from giving real answer to a question. Imagine you are answering a questionnaire asking you the same questions three times in different words, how do you feel? Probably not very happy. You might think it’s a waste of your time and may start to make up answers or even stop taking the survey.

The ideal form of multiple-item measures is to have 3-5 questions asking about the same topic without the respondents’ awareness that those questions are asking the same topic. To be honest, it is extremely hard to achieve. Nevertheless, we do have techniques and tips to make it happen. In my future posts, I’ll introduce those guidelines little by little. If you are interested in this topic, please follow or RSS my blog so you can receive my updates in the first time.

Do you understand what reliability is after reading this post? Now we know both what validity and reliability are. Can you tell the difference between them? The target picture below can help you review and  differentiate the two concepts.

In the next post, I’m going to introduce the last but not lease basic measurement concept that I think is crucial, level of measurement. It’s coming soon!

Why Do I Love Market Research So Much?

If you ask me what the luckiest thing in the world is, I will tell you that is to find something you think is meaningful, you are  interested in, and you can do well and make a living on it. I feel I am the luckiest guy in the world. Not because I found my Mr. Right (hopefully, he is coming soon : b), but because I’ve already found my “lucky overlap” of the three criteria I just mentioned.

My Lucky Overlap: Why I Love Market Research So Much

That is the reason I LOVE market research with PASSION AND MY FULL HEART! What is your “lucky overlap”? Have you found it yet?