By Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer - Vision Critical The question you ask can shape or even determine the answer you get. Questions need to be crafted with a great deal of care. Let me tell you a story about two priests to illustrate this point. Two older Irish priests were down at the pub having a pint and a smoke. And as they chatted and lit up another cigarette, they discussed smoking and praying. One said to ... | Read More

By Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer - Vision Critical As technological advances create a growing enticement to consumers, the level of integration that people subscribe to with gadgets and inventions becomes increasingly interesting – and segmented. A recent international survey on technology adoption has identified four technological people groups: The Techno Elites, The Technology Challenged, The Pragmatic Users, and The Techno Snails. All four segments have been identified and profiled, complete with video interviews, in Vision Critical’s Technology Segmentation Study. The segments ... | Read More

By: Andrew Grenville - Chief Research Officer It drives me bonkers when researchers, trying to understand people’s attitudes, use a scale that allows people to say they “neither agree nor disagree”. This renders the statement nigh upon useless. The problem is a variation on the conundrum of comparing apples and oranges. When we ask someone how much they agree or disagree with a statement, we are asking them where, on a continuum, they stand. The continuum can be sliced ... | Read More

By Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer - Vision Critical The market research world will undergo tremendous transformations over the next decade. There will be industry-altering births, deaths, explosions and implosions. Here are four things that will define survey research in the coming year and decade. 1. Terrible DIY research will almost kill the industry, but research will arise leaner, meaner and smarter. With access to Survey Monkey, Zoomerang and the like, coupled with cheap access panels and other sources of questionable ... | Read More

By: Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer - Vision Critical Part Of Series: Questions & Answers: On the Art and Science of Survey Research Emotions play a powerful role in consumer choice. Researchers and marketers are coming to understand this more and more and, as a result, many people are trying to measure feelings. A lot of market researchers are using images of facial expressions to capture emotions. Some do it with cute little cartoon characters, others with pictures ... | Read More

By: Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer, Vision Critical Part Of Series: "Questions & Answers: On the Art and Science of Survey Research" Why? That’s the question we researchers want the answer to all the time. But when we ask it, we never get the truth we’re looking for. What we get is a response that is driven by the social context in which we ask it. In other words, people give us the answers they think we are ... | Read More