There are umpteen pathways an organisation may take when deciding on how best to react to a contractionary phase of the business cycle. Forethought has measured the effect on clients that have ceased programmes only to recommence them in an expansionary phase. We thought at this challenging time you might appreciate us sharing such insight.

By all accounts, the degree of global substitution of computer-aided telephone interviewing (CATI) by online data collection has been breathtaking. Yet today, amongst the many happy online data collection stories of cost and time reductions, troubling accounts of unexpected biases are also emerging.

It is important to resist treating analytics as an ad hoc activity but instead be prepared to embed them into business decision processes on a repeatable basis.

The article titled ‘The Juster 11-Point Probability Scale’ featured in the February 2008 edition of Research News. As a result Wollongong academic John Rossiter responded to the article with a letter to the editor. In essence, what Rossiter proposes as the ‘correct’ approach is to take a single measure (in this case the Juster scale) and re-weight the response in order to better predict business outcomes.

There are three measures of average: the mean, median and mode. All of them perform the function of estimating the value that represents where the majority of observations fall in a set of data. However, depending on what is being measured and how it is distributed, each of these three measures may produce very different estimates of the average.

Survey questionnaires remain the most prevalent mode of data collection in marketing research, but has its high use resulted in diminished errors? I think it is timely to revisit not the strengths – we know there are many – but the weaknesses that we should be cognisant of when analysing data collected using survey questionnaires.

One of the world’s top marketing minds, Professor George S. Day, visited Australia to present his recently completed work at a breakfast presentation hosted by Forethought Research. His topic “Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Can Make or Break Your Firm”, was an important new perspective for anyone with the responsibility for generating or applying market insight.

The management folly of adopting the Net Promoter Score as the 'one measure' and why value-for-money provides greater insight...

Applying contemporary marketing science to assist in identifying brand drivers.

This paper centres on the various performance-measurement orientations a firm might adopt. Should an organisation's measurement focus have a production orientation, a customer orientation, a market orientation or a combination of these?

There is a growing trend amongst Forethought clients to leverage their research projects for the benefit of generating publicity for their organisation. Research projects that involve a substantial number of market and/or customer interviews provide the avenue in which to do this.

Perhaps nothing separates qualitative from quantitative research more than this single word - validity. But as researchers know, there are many forms of validity just as there are 'many forms of truth' (John Stuart Mill, philosopher). The following are the types of validity that are most relevant for marketing research.

If you have ever been on a dairy farm around milking time you know all about the herd instinct: once one cow heads for the milking shed the entire herd follows. So it might also seem for the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the marketing research industry in Australia.

It appears that in marketing research, once a scale has been selected, it is often employed in every project thereafter seemingly regardless of the changing research objectives. There is no one scale that is appropriate in every situation.

If the debate on scales isn't tough enough then there is the heroic assumption that we all use the scale the same way. Perhaps for one person 8 is a score that represents a perfectly acceptable performance, but for another it means there is some scope for improvement. Calibration questions allow some way of interpreting respondents' ratings so that they are able to be uniformly considered.