Marketing in Real Life

Over the weekend I was catching up on back issues of The Marketing News and came across an article by Elisabeth Sullivan titled Delve Deeper: Online Research Developments to Understand Consumer Motivation. The article quotes Nora Ganim Barnes of UMass Dartmouth's Center for market research about the need to do better than traditional online feedback mechanisms. "The last thing you want to do is have someone go to your web site and you say 'Click on this link' to provide feedback,' and you have a box pop up that's limited to 120 characters. That's cold, impersonal." She continues to say "...while online feedback surveys give customers the sense that they're throwing their opinions into the void, blogs provide a forum in which customers can interact with one another." Throwing opinions into the void. I agree. Our (Invoke) research sessions simulate a live discussion experience so respondents feel like they are part of a group. It...

Bob Skolnick , North American CEO of Synovate seems to think so in this month's Marketing News... This heightened need to understand competitors and consumers may well prove a boon to the market research industry, despite the struggles of the economy at large. Bob Skolnick , North American CEO of Chicago-based market research firm Synovate , predicts "was abobe average growth" in the overall demand for data. Because of the demand for data, Skolnick notes, Synovate has been under greater pressure to yield applicable results. "Client companies need to see smart research done to make sure they are satisfying their best customers and developing new business where they can," he says. "The market research business, while not recession-proof, is much less susceptible to budgets being cut."