Forethought Research, in conjunction with leading marketing academics Professor John Roberts and Professor Peter Danaher, have been named as finalists in an internationally prestigious marketing science award. The INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) and Marketing Science Institute’s (MSI) Practice Prize recognises outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods.

Despite the assumption made in most university statistics courses, in marketing research we are not always dealing with an infinite population. Take business-to-business research as an example. You might be most interested in the 20% of customers who provide 80% of sales.

Statistically valid sample sizes are calculated based on required levels of precision and reliability – but are there situations where it is acceptable to collect less than this required sample size?

In market research, our primary goal is to find out what is happening in the market place. In most situations, however, a complete census of the relevant market, which would provide that elusive “perfect information”, is prohibited by its large size or lack of documentation. Instead, we seek to examine only part of the population (or market) and still be able to draw valuable conclusions about the market place as a whole.

When Forethought first offered marketing research services, computer speed was as common a topic as internet speed is today. Some Marketing Scientists at Forethought can recall the grinding torment of waiting for their 50 megahertz computer in the mid 1990’s to produce one regression model.

The discipline of marketing science is relatively young. The application of mathematically based algorithms in marketing stem to the undisputed father of marketing science, luminary Professor John Little PhD, Chair Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Contrary to the belief of generations of marketing graduates, brand equity is not an outcome. At best, based on the myriad of often divergent definitions, it is an input. Brand is simply stored value in the form of future purchase behaviour. If your current brand tracker does not strongly correlate with changes in market share then it is not measuring brand.

Sales Executive performance within a role is generally an outcome of the match between their knowledge, skills and abilities, and the requirements of their position. Identifying the part that rapport and personal interests play in achieving loyalty and advocacy supports a focus on increasing the level of rapport-building skills within a sales executive group.

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? 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.