When people think about market research, they often think of it in terms of an organization looking outside itself for insights into their customers or markets. That is a large part of it, but an often overlooked (and sometimes feared) application of market research involves turning the lens around and looking inside your own organization. Read more

Syracuse, NY has enjoyed a long history as one of the nation’s top test markets. The metropolitan area’s use by marketers as proving ground of eventual product success or failure has been well documented for decades. Products both famous and obscure, ranging from ice cream to alcoholic beverages to baby carrots have been tested in Syracuse Read more

Many clients have their own market research department in-house, while others have gone through the process of selecting a market research supplier.  Depending on whether you are looking for a long-term retainer firm who works as your consultant or a short-term one project supplier, the process is usually the same.  You have to select a Read more

There are many types of sampling methods available in a market researcher’s toolbox.  Each method has its pros and cons.  Some methods, much more so than others, are suitable for specific types of marketing research.  Some sampling methods are truly random in that each member of the specific population has an equal chance of being Read more

Customer satisfaction research is one of the most basic forms of market research.  It’s a course of research that virtually all businesses have considered, and in a lot of cases implemented.  Customer satisfaction surveying is a linchpin in process improvement, offers a portal to customer feedback, and is used to evaluate products and services.  Yet there are many Read more

We recently read an in-depth article posted in the December 2010 issue of Quirk’s.  The author is Mark Goodin, President of Aaron-Abrams Field Support Services in Las Vegas.  Goodin makes an impassioned plea to those who recruit respondents for qualitative research to improve the quality of their service by not taking shortcuts, offering excuses instead of Read more

At RMS, we are frequently asked by our clients what kind of response rate they can expect from their survey research, or after the fact, if the survey response they did receive was “good.” Usually, the most honest answer we can give to those questions is “It depends.” The truth is that survey response rates are Read more

We here in the research bunker discuss a fair amount of football in our downtime and during our lunch breaks.  So, with the NFL Playoffs just around the corner, we figured we would use today to take an interest of ours and craft a blog post out of it – by relating it to market Read more

From our guest blogger Kim Cuccaro, former Business Development Specialist at RMS. Everyone is familiar with the Nike® slogan “Just Do It”.  A lot can also be said for making a decision and going through with it.  Oftentimes businesses fail to find common ground between slapdash decision-making and a lengthier drawn out decision-making process. I commonly see Read more

This post was written by our Guest Blogger Mark Dengler who is President here at Research & Marketing Strategies, Inc. (RMS). When doing market research, businesses often wonder whether they should conduct qualitative or quantitative research. Qualitative research is used to explore and understand people’s beliefs, experiences, attitudes, behavior and interactions. It generates non-numerical data – Read more