May 2013
1 post
Why Less Is More in Website Optimisation....
When seeking to optimise a web page or a customer journey it is important to consider how much impact an individual change will have on conversion. This is where experience can help, but each website and its customers are unique so previous tests are no guarantee of future behaviour. Indeed, visitor behaviour is heavily influenced by emotional impulses and sometimes appears irrational. People...
March 2013
1 post
Hidden Human Motivations. What Mountaineering Can...
Marketers and researchers often use the term ‘consumer’ to describe customers and prospects. We conduct consumer research, and measure consumer awareness of brands. We also have consumer confidence measures as if they are a separate segment of society. As the article I’m not your consumer asserts the term is “counter productive and misguided”. It implies that consuming things...
February 2013
1 post
What Do Business People Really Think About Market...
What’s the most frustrating aspect of working as a client-side researcher? Some recent posts on Twitter #mrx suggest that research agencies may be the culprit. Well, we all have our bad days. But when working as a client-side research manager I found the attitudes and misconceptions about research among some of my colleagues to be one of the most frequently occurring issues.
First of all there...
January 2013
1 post
8 tags
The Ripple Effect! (IHWSH) The Influence Of Others...
Can most of the things we buy really be the result of other’s behaviour and opinions, whether openly or through covert imitation? This was a response to my blog about how social networks influence mass behaviour. The idea does challenge conventional thinking about how people make decisions and common assumptions that most market research is based upon. However, many of these are false...
December 2012
1 post
3 tags
8 Reasons To Start Blogging Today!
It’s FREE and easy to set up and maintain. Using a blog platform is very easy and it’s simple to choose from a range of free design templates. When you want to change the template you can do this for all your posts at the click of a mouse. For the more advanced bloggers some platforms also support free plugins or extras. These extend and expand the functionality of your blog....
November 2012
1 post
12 tags
What Makes Social Networks Tick?
What underlies the evolutionary success of the human race and allows social networks to function? In the book ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ by Bentley, Earls (@Herdmeister) and O’Brien, the authors’ assert that cooperation between individuals is key to both.
Research into a diverse range of group activities by Northwestern University Institute found that individual performance was a...
October 2012
2 posts
8 tags
The Influence of Social Networks on Human...
This post has also been published on the Green Book Blog market research website.
In ‘I’ll have what she’s having’; Mark Earls and his co-authors explain how social learning (i.e. imitating other people) acts as the engine for the spread of culture, human behaviour and ultimately innovation. The authors reassert the need for those wanting to influence mass behaviour to...
5 tags
Do Companies Care About The Quality Of Market...
I’ve recently read a number of posts about the quality of market research. Some of these posts have criticised poor practices of research suppliers and others point to the frailties client side-researchers. Some valid points have been made, but there is a danger that we are missing the bigger picture here.
Market research is a collaborative process and unless all parties work together we...
August 2012
2 posts
4 tags
4 Common Myths About Human Decision Making! By...
Prices are determined by supply and demand!
Despite what economist might tell us, prices are often not the result of an equilibrium between supply and demand. When a new product is launched the initial price can be fairly arbitrary. It may simply reflect what the seller believes customers will be prepared to pay. However, experiments in behavioural sciences show that the first price that we...
3 tags
Why Do Companies Buy Cheap Market Research? By...
I read with interest Edward Appleton’s blog (Can MR Clients Recognise Quality When They See It?). Edward was commenting on Reg Baker’s post Final Thoughts on MRMW where he suggested that
“if online and social media have taught us nothing else it’s that clients sooner or later will buy cheap data over good data every time.”
I agree with Edward that cheapness is...
July 2012
2 posts
9 tags
The Psychology of Loss! By @northresearch #mrx
As anyone who bought stocks at the height of the dot.com bubble will probably understand, making a quick profit is great, but making a loss is difficult to stomach! Behavioural scientists call this loss aversion. People are intrinsically afraid of losses. When compared against each other people hate losing more than they enjoy winning. Thus losses loom larger than gains even though the value...
11 tags
How Market Research Can Help Prevent Mis-Selling...
The latest mis-selling scandal in UK banking reminded me of the value of having accurate and credible monitoring of customer interactions where advice is being given. In financial services this is particularly important because poor advice can be very costly to the customer and may have long term consequences on their lifestyle.
However, reputation and good will is critical in all businesses...
June 2012
1 post
14 tags
The Myth of Consumer Rationality! Financial...
Now published on the GreenBook Blog market research website!
I’ve worked as a customer insight and research manager in financial services (FS) for most of my career. During this time I’ve noticed that colleagues often assume that consumers are more rational when buying financial products compared to other categories of goods and services. There is a perception that FS products are...
May 2012
1 post
1 tag
How Myths Are Formed! The Law Of Small Numbers.
Much of the attention given to Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, fast and slow has been about how people make decisions and the implications for models of consumer behaviour. However, the book also points out that researchers have their own bias - the law of small numbers! Is this bias to blame for many modern day myths?
What is it?
It’s a general bias that makes people favour...
April 2012
3 posts
1 tag
How Good Is Your Intuition? Behavioural Economics...
In his book Thinking, fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman outlines how the human brain uses two different mental systems for making decisions:
System 1 - The fast, automatic, little or no effort, intuitive, but largely unconscious mind.
System 2 - The slow, disciplined, effort hungry, largely conscious mind that monitors system 1 and allocates attention to more complex mental problems that require...
Linking Insights to Marketing Strategy! A...
This post has been published on the GreenBook Blog market research website.
Client-side researchers sometimes feel that they are constantly being asked to justify the value of research insights. A frequent challenge from management is how can we measure the value of insights and what specific decisions have been driven by research. Ideally management would like to understand how research links...
1 tag
The Irrational Visitor: 17 Conversion Optimisation...
Behavioural economics indicates that people are often irrational in their decision making as they are heavily influenced by biases that are in the unconscious mind. This means that conversion professionals can utilise knowledge of these ‘rules of thumb’ to nudge website visitors towards a particular behaviour. However, because people are not fully aware of these influences customer...
March 2012
4 posts
2 tags
7 Marketing Myths About Online Conversion...
As online businesses have matured and competition for customers has intensified, conversion optimisation has become an increasingly important method for improving the customer experience and ultimately conversion. Developing a program of online experiments using split (A/B) testing and Multivariate Testing (MVT) enables organizations to identify which new elements of a customer experience have...
Not Invented-Here Bias. Why good ideas take time...
Even in the digital age new ideas and innovations can take a long time to be adopted by organisations that could benefit from them. Why is this? One explanation is the “If I (or we) didn’t invent it, then it’s not worth much.”
This is sometimes referred to as Not Invented-Here bias. The behavioural economist Dan Ariely conducted experiments to understand why this occurs....
Should Focus Groups Carry A Health Warning?...
This post has been published on the GreenBook Blog market research website.
Since starting out as a client-side researcher focus groups have frequently been recommend to me as a suitable exploratory method. Initially this wasn’t a problem. I was new to the industry. However, over the years I have gradually become more aware of their frailties. I have come across some excellent moderators....
