Data Specialists in two cities

 A pall of smoke hung over Princes Street Gardens in the Centre of Edinburgh.

‘That’ll be the smoke from the one o’clock cannon,’ explained a native Edinburgh chap to his companion. ‘It goes off every day at one o’clock.’

‘It’s only ten to one’ , his friend  pointed out.

So our native Edinburgher had to respond. What do most people do when the information they are sure is accurate, is not? They feel they have been caught out, the data is inaccurate and they clutch at pet phrases or idioms. They bluster.

‘I’m entitled to my opinion’, he blustered on.  Like the moon is made of green cheese or the earth is flat. Does an ‘opinion’ really mean believing something to be true, which verifiably is not?

In London, at the opposite end of the importance of data scale, I encountered  one of these life changing ‘Aha!’ moments. The chap, peering at a complex data set, pushed his glasses up on to his forehead and said ‘Aha, this is not AF. It’s a history of episodes of SVT.’

This is the world of identifying heart problems and their treatment.

Our chap read a set of data produced by a machine which recorded heart beats and was saying ‘this is not a pattern of irregular and very fast heart beats, merely a pattern of very fast heart beats.’

Important – Oh yes! and directly contradicting the ‘opinion’ of a previous expert.

Another case of ‘everyone’s entitled to their opinion?’

Oh no! – this is a failure by one professional to read a set of data properly, the consequence being a wrong diagnosis and a wrong treatment plan.

Nothing wrong with the data collection, nothing wrong with data presentation – a lot wrong with data interpretation. There are professionals and then there are specialists – often a specialist makes the genuine difference.

Are either of these case studies transferable to your company or organisation?

Market Research is changing – Do’s and Don’ts Updated.

Market Research is changing – Do’s and Don’ts  Updated.

Everyone knows that first the internet and now social media is shaking up the way we do everything – from spending money, to making money, to researching better ways of doing either or both.

Research is my game and what follows is my opinion on what’s Hot and what’s Not.

Survey Monkey Quick Surveys etc

 These are perfectly good, if limited, Research tools. In the wrong hands, for companies using Survey Monkey or Quick surveys etc., it is like placing a chain saw in the hands of 3 year olds – decent tools become lethal in the wrong hands.  Too often users are like the worst DIY amateurs– it’s like they pop down to Jewsons on a Saturday thinkingknow a trick or two , come back with a few bits and bobs for a fraction of the price of a decent plumber – then wreck the walls, the pipework, and ultimately cost you a lot more, with attendant grief.

Don’t do this unless you have decent design, data collection and analysis facilities to hand.

Telephone research 

In a few years this will have disappeared completely – this is because hardly anybody, certainly not young people, bother with their land lines – and no-one has good mobile phone databases – so it may still be a feature of B2B but Not B2C research

Twitter, Face Book, Texts and other social media

The jury is out – there’s a lot of experimentation going on, but market research as we know it is not faring too well – the processes are too lightweight, too superficial to be utterly convincing.

 

 Good New stuff

 

Things like psychographics, the study of personality values, attitudes interests and lifestyles are replacing mere demographics. It’s comparatively early days yet, but it seems to me this approach has legs, particularly in retail.

 

Focus Groups

Properly organized and without too many dubious frills like the interpretation of body language, these are still useful. Better still are data driven discussions where the quantitative drives and acts as a cornerstone of the qualitative research.

 

Online research

 Often the staple for lazy thinkers, dwindling numbers of completions imperil this cheap mode of operational research. It’s successful if you go to companies like YouGov to do it for you but watch the pennies running away.

 

Face to Face research

 If done properly it remains the gold standard. Ensure that your approach includes the right technology, the right field researchers, the right research design and the right analysts, who can tackle both the technology and derive genuine and actionable insights.

Don’t let research amateurs near you. Banish them to the furthest parts of your fiefdom.