In the market research industry data quality is everything.  Data quality needs to be a top priority – everything relies on it.  Putting your energy into monitoring the quality of your data will help ensure the quality of your results, quality findings, and quality recommendations.  In previous blog posts we’ve talked about things such as pre-testing, Read more

Did you know that CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) allows hospitals to change their approved HCAHPS® survey vendor on a quarterly basis?  That means you can select a new HCAHPS® vendor at four different times during the calendar year.  This depends on the current contract you have with your vendor, but if you Read more

I have a confession to make: I’ve been obsessively following the recent story about NCAA athletic conference realignment, hanging on all the details, developments, and speculation the same way a lot of people did with the Casey Anthony trial or Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown earlier this year. A lot of that is because Syracuse, my Read more

This post was written by our guest blogger Erin Wisneski, Communications Coordinator at Research & Marketing Strategies (RMS) – a market research agency in Syracuse, NY. Since the recession hit at the start of this decade, many companies have downsized, outsourcing various department functions, especially those which traditionally require extensive staffing and intensive management. Enter Read more

One of the challenges of the market research business is that many of those who need your service don’t realize they need it. Or they don’t understand that you’re the place to find it. Large corporations tend to use a lot of research, and they have internal research departments and they speak the jargon. (We Read more

This blog post was written by our guest blogger Mark Dengler, President and Owner of Research & Marketing Strategies (RMS) Inc. – a market research vendor in Syracuse, NY. As a small business owner, you may know you should do market research, you may want to do market research, but you think you can’t afford Read more

It goes without saying – some level of pre-testing is a must before launching a full-scale survey. Survey Sampling International (SSI) defines a pre-test as a questionnaire that is tested on a statistically small sample of respondents before a full-scale study.  The benefits of pre-testing cannot be overstated whether you go to the extent of a soft launch or Read more

This post was written by our guest blogger Mark Dengler, President of Research & Marketing Strategies (RMS), a market research firm in Syracuse, NY. What is mystery shopping or secret shopping? Mystery shopping can come in all forms – from phone calls, online inquiries and most commonly, in-person visits. Typically, a script or checklist of Read more

Data weighting is a technique that is commonly used in market research. Many people reading this will already know what the concept means. If you’re not one of them, it refers to the practice of adjusting data results to either overcome sampling bias or to give more or less significance to factors based on their estimated Read more

Syracuse, New York has had a long history of being used as a test market (from past to present).  A 2004 report titled Mirror of America, published by Acxiom, ranked Syracuse as one of the top five test markets in the United States.  There are many reasons for choosing Syracuse as a test market including low advertising Read more