Data breaches are one of the biggest risks that businesses face in today’s world. Around 86% of business leaders see cyber security as their most concerning threat is data security. A benefit of hiring a market research service is its risk...

AI and the Marketing Revolution Digital marketing is experiencing substantial changes in the last few years due to the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A report shows that over 60% of companies with an innovation strategy are using AI to...

Knowing buyers personas is a no-nonsense shortcut to revenue growth and solid brand presence. The buyer personas knowledge gives you the opportunity to focus all your resources in a way that will ensure maximum efficiency and is a powerful strategy...

Why Competitive Analysis Improves Marketing Performance: If you want to become a top player in your industry, you’ll have to understand the dynamics of today’s marketplace. Your marketing performance can be significantly improved if you...

Why Data-Driven Marketing Strategies? Data-driven marketing has become a popular phrase among entrepreneurs, especially with the development of big data. For users and business owners alike, there has never been an easier time to satisfy one’s...

Is blockchain technology a useful and valuable innovation or is it 99% hype? I've noticed lots of articles claiming that it will change digital marketing and advertising forever. But I've seen little evidence of live applications that solve any...

New Coke, or Coke II, is the biggest marketing mistake ever. Why did New Coke fail when Coca Cola spent $4 million on development? The company conducted over 200,000 taste tests and commissioned numerous focus groups and surveys. Executives claimed...

Word clouds are a great creative tool that many of us love to play around with. They generate an image composed of words from content that has been submitted in the tool. The size of individual words in the word cloud indicates its frequency or...

Explicit methods of research, such as focus groups and questionnaires are often very poor at predicting behaviour. Is it time to switch to implicit research techniques? When asked direct questions people are notorious for saying one thing, but...

LinkedIn & The First Rule of Social Media Marketing: I recently saw this post on LinkedIn and wondered why some users were surprised by the negative comments it received. The post reads; “Last weekend I had the pleasure of travelling to...

Eye Tracking As previously covered, eye tracking is a tool that is becoming increasingly popular for a host of digital marketing issues. Including conversion rate optimisation. The original post covered specific eye tracking and facial...

Personas templates are often in user-centred design because they create better understanding of and empathy for prospects and customers alike. Buyer persona templates are used for a variety of purposes, including as a customer journey mapping tool,...

Buyer Personas and website optimisation: Why is it that there is so much talk about creating buyer personas and yet I often see little evidence that they are utilised effectively? Creating buyer personas make a lot of sense but rarely do they...

What do users want from your digital experience? We used the Hotjar user experience tool to place a poll on our homepage to find out what users want from the page. We then compared this with what was actually on the page. The Venn diagram...

Address Lookup Solutions Speed Up Data Input: Address lookup solutions allow customers to quickly input and validate address details as they go through a sign-up or checkout process. They shorten form length and can significantly reduce the time...

Is The Market Research Budget Under Pressure? A few years ago I was working for a UK commercial bank and the Marketing department had been called to meet the new Head of Marketing. As our new colleague was introduced to each area of marketing...

So what did I take away from attending the London Conversion Conference on 29th October? Well, to keep it simple here are my top insights and key take-outs from the conference. Psychology is our guide: Behaviour drives preferences....

Names and the psychological associations they hold are so deeply rooted in our psyche that we are magnetically drawn towards the concepts they embody. These associations are so strong that they can result in behaviour that is automatic and totally...

The biggest mistake people make with conversion rate optimisation is not having a well-defined process to ensure a systematic approach to improving success metrics such as revenues or sales. Without such a process you are almost certainly going...

Does Your Voice of Customer programme deliver value?  To get more value from your voice of customer programme don't follow the standard, but flawed approach. This means not just using conventional surveys, but instead employing more...

Why Are Voice of Customer surveys fundamentally flawed? Voice of Customer (VoC) surveys are a popular, but deeply flawed for organisations to monitor customer preferences and levels of satisfaction. They follow a standard process of using...

Behavioural Economics and Gut Instinct: Business people pride themselves in their decision making and many businesses embed market and competitor research into this process. However, business people often prefer their gut instinct as they are...

There are many misconceptions from business people about how to conduct and use market research. This can be frustrating when you work in market research on the client-side. Some recent posts on Twitter suggest that research agencies are often at...

To Blog Or Not To Blog - That Is The Question! It’s FREE and easy to set up and maintain. Using a blogging 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...

What Do Executives Care About? I’ve 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 of client side-researchers. Some valid...

“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." Reg Baker I read with interest Edward Appleton’s blog (Can MR Clients Recognise Quality When They See...

Using Research To Protect Brand Reputation: Video mystery shopping is a contentious research methodology. However, rarely does a month go by without hearing about another mis-selling scandal in financial services or some other regulated sector....

What Is The Law of Small Numbers? The psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out that many social scientists, psychologists and market researchers often fall foul of a common human bias - the law of small numbers! Is this bias to blame for...

Action Planning & ROI: Client-side researchers sometimes feel that they are constantly justifying the value of research insights. A frequent challenge from management is how can we measure the benefits of insights and what specific decisions...

Can Behavioural Economics Save Market Research? When I first started working in market research I realised that people frequently don’t say what they mean and don’t do what they say. Behavioural economics suggests that this is because our...