What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – October 27, 2012

By Jeffrey Henning

A common theme recently has been looking at the dark side of market research—common mistakes, why research “sucks”, why it is dying, why it can’t brand itself, and so forth. Let’s hope this is just an early celebration of the Day of the Dead!

Of the 1,728 unique links shared on the #MRX community in the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted.

1. The 6 Worst Market Research Mistakes– Annie Pettit of Conversition Strategies identifies the top six market research problems she encounters:
   • Not starting with a research objective.
   • Using insufficient sample sizes.
   • Being bound by statistical significance, or lack thereof.
   • Generalizing beyond your sample.
   • Creating something out of nothing.
   • Focusing on entertaining, not educating.
2. Global Prices Study 2012: US Market Research – Price is No Object? – Sue York of NewMR and Ray Poynter of Vision Critical conducted a global price survey for ESOMAR. The U.S. remains the most expensive country for fieldwork, followed by Switzerland, Canada, Japan and the UK.
3. Double Jeopardy in Social Media Usage – Ray Poynter of Vision Critical looks at the impact of double jeopardy on social media platforms. Double jeopardy is the idea that larger brands have more loyal customers and – conversely and countering conventional wisdom – niche brands have less loyal customers. Ray shares data from 861 surveys fielded to an Australian panel.
4. Why So Much Market Research Sucks – Roger Dooley recounts the tale of how, as a young product manager, he saw market research that showed that price was least important to his employer’s customers and prospects. As a result, the company raised prices and saw a dramatic change…
5. Is Market Research Like the Shoemakers’ Children? – Tony Cosentino, author of Into the River: How Big Data, The Long Tail, and Situated Cognition are Changing the World of Market Insights Forever, identifies the benefit of research firms positioning themselves more as technology suppliers.
6. How to Implement Consumer Segmentation with Social Media  – Andrew Somasi discusses three ways that you can segment social media data: by geography, using geotagging of posts from smart phones; by behavior, developing text analysis taxonomies to classify where consumers are in the purchase cycle; and by demographics and psychographics, by aggregating sites that attract specific customer segments.
7. Big Data needs Research to Answer ‘Why’, says Dunnhumby Founder – Clive Humby argues that “Data is about ‘how many’ and ‘how much’, whereas research is about ‘why’ – you have to join it all up.”
8. The Death of MR Postponed – Reg Baker finds a reprieve for MR in Clive Humby’s quote.
9. Focus on the User – Simon Chadwick conducts a wide-ranging interview with Paul McDonald of Google Consumer Surveys about the development of the system and possible directions for the future.
10. Text Analysis of 2012 Presidential Debates – Tom H. C. Anderson conducts a text analysis of the first two debates between President Obama and Governor Romney to contrast the two candidates’ speaking styles.

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted. A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX.