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

Research & Marketing Strategies (RMS) is a market research vendor in Upstate NY with an available focus group facility in the Buffalo, NY area.  QualiSight is located in Syracuse, on the fringe of Western NY.  The Syracuse market is very similar to the Buffalo market on a number of key demographics and market characteristics.  So, if you Read more

All businesses engage in some form of market research.  Market research comes in all forms – both formal and informal.  One example of formalized market research would be a Fortune 50 company like Johnson & Johnson conducting a series of 16 different focus groups across the country to test three new varieties of Listerine, followed by Read more

A good market researcher will always try to organize a report in such a way that the data tells a story. That’s the main difference between presenting a client with insights rather than just a data dump. One of the most powerful graphic tools at the researcher’s disposal when it comes to making data come Read more

Research & Marketing Strategies, Inc. (RMS), a full service market research firm, recently expanded its call center, which offers inbound and outbound communication services to companies seeking to outsource various department functions, especially those which traditionally require extensive staffing and intensive management. “We offer multiple businesses inbound calling services, reducing the amount of downtime and Read more

We’ve covered mystery shopping before in a number of different posts.  Those blog posts defined mystery shopping as a market research service designed to measure the quality of customer service or gather specific information about products and services.  Mystery shopping accomplishes that by sending a trained secret shopper into a facility or storefront to evaluate their Read more