Marketing in Real Life

Forrester's 2009 Market Research Predictions are out and if you're not a subscriber, you can at least read the executive summary here... One prediction of note: "Traditional qualitative research will see erosion as market research online communities (MROCs) and fusions of quantitative and qualitative research from firms such as Invoke Solutions gain steam. In short, everyone will be looking for ways to gain insights to succeed in a troubling market in as cost-effective a manner as possible. This means that newer research modes will gain traction and grab more share of stable or declining market research budgets — even among research buyers who have been more traditional in the past."

I'll be honest, I don't get the Black Friday thing. My wife wishes we had been home to go shopping. My sister-in-law and father-in-law were out at 4 AM searching for deals. A worker in New Jersey gets trampled to death. Hmmmm. I have long believed that the media and entertainment are unfairly blamed for negative actions taken by average people (see the letter written to Tipper Gore back in my early youth about music censorship.) I do, however, point the finger at least partially at marketers for the tragedy at Wal-Mart this past week. Every ad is designed to create a first come first serve frenzy, yet people are shocked that a crowd would react as instructed and go charging in to a store as it opens to get the best deal. Perhaps next year retailers could develop a less chaotic way to promote and execute on this key revenue generating day. Now excuse me, but I have cyber-monday deals to find!

I'll be honest, I don't get the Black Friday thing. My wife wishes we had been home to go shopping. My sister-in-law and father-in-law were out at 4 AM searching for deals. A worker in New Jersey gets trampled to death. Hmmmm. I have long believed that the media and entertainment are unfairly blamed for negative actions taken by average people (see the letter written to Tipper Gore back in my early youth about music censorship.) I do, however, point the finger at least partially at marketers for the tragedy at Wal-Mart this past week. Every ad is designed to create a first come first serve frenzy, yet people are shocked that a crowd would react as instructed and go charging in to a store as it opens to get the best deal. Perhaps next year retailers could develop a less chaotic way to promote and execute on this key revenue generating day. Now excuse me, but I have cyber-monday deals to find!

As a huge fan of LinkedIn, I am very excited to say that Invoke Solutions is among the first companies to have access to LinkedIn members for research purposes. Using our Engage Open methodology, we'll be able to target business respondents and get their valuable qualitatative and quantitative input for our clients.

Invoke's Peter Mackey was recently on a panel at the Research Industry Summit in Chicago hosted by IIR and the Research Report's Bob Lederer. In preparation, we were asked to answer a few questions about the data quality issue and we thought the responses were worth sharing. 1) How do you define quality? There does not appear to be a universal definition for quality. Most of the discussion around quality has been focusing on quality of the participant and placing the burden for improving quality on the sample providers. I believe this is a superficial view of the issue. At Invoke, we define quality in three ways. First, is quality of the participant. We need to ensure that people are who they say they are and that their responses are truthful. Given the Engage Live experience and the transparency to the data it provides, we have a real-time window into respondent integrity. As a result, we make an extra effort to screen properly. And we pay close attention to participa...