Kantar's Profiles Blog

This is the third in a series of blog posts on research uses and techniques. This blog focuses on planning and implementing the marketing mix via the 4 P’s of marketing—product, price, place, and promotion.

Smart speakers are dramatically affecting consumers’ daily lives. According to Quartz blog, “These devices give companies access to a trove of user data in the form of every command a user asks of their device.” Today, 34 percent of Americans own a smart speaker and a new wave of devices are now hitting the consumer market.

According to a January 2017 Pew Research report, the vast majority of Americans – 95% – now own a cellphone of some kind; the share of Americans that own smartphones rose to 77%, up from just  35% in Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership conducted just six years ago. And recently, MediaPost cited Cisco's Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast (2016 to 2021) which reported, “that by 2021, more members of the global population will use mobile phones -- 5.5 billion -- than have bank accounts at 5.4 billion, running water at 5.3 billion or landlines at 2.9 billion.” There’s no doubting that mobile is now mainstream, but online surveys still outrank mobile surveys in digital data collection methods according to the latest GRIT Report.

In Debunking Weighting Misperceptions, our first post in the weighting data mini-series, we reviewed the benefits of weighting and debunked misconceptions. Now, we review how to appropriately weight and evaluate the weighting scheme.

With the presidential election in the United States in full swing there has been a lot of talk about the validity of political polls. This includes discussion on how to appropriately weight data. In this mini-series, we unlock the truths behind these weighting myths and misconceptions.

Most of us know that the mobile phone industry is on a pretty serious surge of personal use. In fact, think of one person you know that does not have a mobile phone. Coming up short? This is precisely the reason why all marketing researchers should have a strong focus on mobile.

Sampling often seems to be an afterthought with clients as many simply state they want a ‘nationally representative sample.’ The question is what does the client mean by a nationally representative sample? One client might think it means representation on age and gender only, while another might expect it to include controls on additional variables like region, income, education, etc.

Many clients include quality checks in surveys to make sure respondents are engaged and are answering honestly. However, many of these checks identify false positives, which often mean valid, engaged respondents are thrown out of the sample. How can we reduce false positives? 

The Marketing Research Shared Interest Group (SIG) of the Cincinnati American Marketing Association meets monthly to discuss industry issues, growing trends, techniques and methodologies. During the February meeting, Brian Lamar from EMI Research Services led a great discussion across multiple industry topics. One common thread across all key points: clients.

I recently attended a conference on the seven habits of highly effective people. When thinking about what I could take back to my organization, one of the most intriguing concepts centered on the fifth step, “seek first to understand, then to be understood”, a.k.a. listening with intent to understand. This intrigued me for many reasons, some of which were related to our internal organizational effectiveness and others that related to our work product with clients. The latter being that, in the same way we need to listen with the intent to understand, we should really be asking questions with the intent to understand. (If it’s the former you’re interested in, I highly recommend attending a seminar!)