Business leaders in marketing, research, communications, and development are specifically charged with moving the business forward. Relevant consumer insights can be difficult to achieve and keep up with, no matter the level of professional expertise. There’s still a lot to be said for plain old common sense and what you absorb anecdotally from..

With the adoption of technologies that offer convenient engagement opportunities, it might seem as if the traditional focus group has seen its day come and go. Market research online communities (MROCs), mobile and social media platforms that allow near 24/7 feedback, as well as chat rooms and video and photo diaries, mean market researchers and..

Recruiting a focus group is often the first step businesses take when beginning a market research study. Focus groups are great ways to begin exploring assumptions about potential products, consumers and the competition. They utilize dynamic interaction amongst peers to gain valuable, albeit general, insights that can help steer a business toward..

It’s often easy for today’s market researcher to forget the value of human connection. With the rise of the Internet, and social media especially, researchers (and the businesses that hire them) can be lured into thinking that digital engagement is a suitable substitute for personal interaction. But quality market research focuses on a range of..

Businesses that invest in focus groups obviously want to generate reliable, relevant data that can be used to make smarter, faster and ultimately more profitable decisions on everything from product development to customer service. Indeed, there’s a reason why market research focus groups have been around for several decades: they work!

Or rather,..

It is an axiom among everyone from engineers to chefs that the cohesiveness, quality and value of a system is fundamentally dependent on its inputs. The right inputs (however that is defined) create a system that does what it’s supposed to do. Conversely, the wrong inputs undermine a system — and make it somewhat dysfunctional at best, and..

Focus groups provide market research firms with efficient ways to garner qualitative data from several people at one time. Whereas an interview can be lengthy and provide only feedback from a singular perspective, the focus group can capitalize on the group setting by utilizing peer interactions and dynamics to gather a (relatively) quick and..

One of the “cringiest” things that a person can do is to find a story, TV show or movie from 40 or more years ago, and see what its creator thought that living in the year 21st century would be like. In fact, you don’t even have to back that far!

As recently as the 1990s, pundits, futurists and other prognosticators depicted a scene in the “not..