Marketing in Real Life

As reported on Boston's CBS News, we did some recent research on what people do with unwanted gifts and found that 59% of people simply kept them around instead of returning them for credit, selling them through online sites like eBay's Kijiji or Craigslist. Watch the clip for more on the story!

As holiday parties kick into full gear, many of us are scrambling to find an appropriate “grab bag,” “Yankee Swap, ” or “Secret Santa” gift. Of the 29% of people planning to participate, we found that motivations varied. According to recent research conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey of 1000 consumers: 71% want their gift to be something they would like to get and maybe will end up with it 25% want their gift to be in high demand and the one that is stolen most often Only 4% want their gift to be the least desired and look forward to someone getting stuck with it

My wife and I are seemingly crazy. We still care about buying thoughtful gifts and spend all year building up our pile so that we’re not wed to craziness at the local mall. But we’re clearly not normal. According to recent research conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey of 1000 consumers 19% of people (25% of males) don’t get started until December rolls around. In fact, when we asked people in October, 12% already knew they would wait until the last minute to buy all of their gifts (17% male, 6% female.) So, as you finish shopping take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. And think of me sitting by the fire with a nice glass of wine. Happy Holidays!

I am privileged to be one of 5 bloggers who, each 15th of the month – will produce a POV on an issue facing the Marketing Research industry. You’ll also be hearing from Annie Pettit (organizer), Bernie Malinoff, Joel Rubinson and Brandon Bertelsen. Links to their posts will follow. I am also particularly excited about this first topic: interactive questioning and its impact on the research industry. A little background… I work at Chadwick Martin Bailey , a high end, mostly quantitative research firm with a focus on segmentation, brand, product development, and customer loyalty work. I have been here for most of the last decade, with a two year stint at Invoke Solutions in the middle. So I see the traditional angle and the non-traditional angle from an inside perspective. Question: Is technology helping or hurting the research industry? Answer: Yes. That is to say that it is not a matter of helping or hurting, it’s about accepting and embracing the reality of technological advances a...

In a recent blog post , Forrester's Brad Bortner lists three ways that researchers might want to consider utilizing social media: Create a private Market Research Online Community. Mine open communities for discussions of interest. Harvest quantitative sample from social networks. These are all completely valid ways of using available resources that live within the comfort zone for researchers - or at most, slightly outside it. But it misses a big opportunity to (in the words of Crimson Hexagon's Candace Fleming ) "listen to consumers in the wild." With constantly improving tools that are tunable to answer specific questions it is now possible to really "hear" the online conversation and make sense of it all. By determining tone and level of influence you can glean tremendously valuable information that feeds other explorations and informs potential online strategies. So why do researchers scratch their heads? We don't know who these people are, wh...