Marketers and researchers make a fundamental error almost universally when developing and testing marketing communications. This error is particularly common and particularly serious when inflicted upon advertising and packaging. We all do it. And we all do it almost all the time. The error isn’t to believe that the medium is the message. The error is to believe the message…
Trade-off Analysis is no panacea. It can’t correct basic errors in judgement. But it can provide an amazingly rich information source that the intelligent product developer, marketer, strategic planner and VC investor can use to profitable benefit. Trade-off Analysis is no panacea. But it can be a crystal ball. How would you like to have a crystal ball that would…
Full profile conjoint- or choice-based trade-off studies have traditionally been limited to six attributes. Full profile studies allow for the estimation of interaction terms and generally present more realistic choices to the respondent than partial profile or self-explicated approaches. However, clients often want to test a long list of potential product features that may or may not be included in…
Do you find this issue’s column title impressive? Ostentatious? Incomprehensible? Your answers (multiple responses allowed) will indicate which conferences you should, and should not, attend. I’ll explain further down. Marketing research conferences can be divided into two broad classes: Vacuous and Substantive. Please note I’ve excluded invitation-only conferences from this taxonomy. I’ve also excluded seminars and workshops. Almost all marketing…
Conjoint Analysis is the most powerful and important family of analytic techniques in all of marketing research. How else can you answer, all at once, questions of this strategic and tactical magnitude: What price will maximize my profits? What features should my product have? How many of these will I sell? Who will buy them? Why will they buy them?…
The author examines four commercial data sets to determine how few choice tasks and/or how few respondents are required for generating reasonably accurate disaggregate utilities when Hierarchical Bayes utility estimation is employed. The author demonstrates that, in carefully designed and analyzed studies, as few as one to four choice tasks per respondent can yield accurate disaggregate choice models. To continue…
The existence of the number of levels effect (NOL) in conjoint models has been widely reported since 1981 (Currim et al.). Currim et al. demonstrated that the effect is, for rank-order data, at least partially mathematical or algorithmic. Green and Srinivasan (1990) have argued that another source of this bias may be behavioral. Although NOL can significantly distort study findings,…
I imagine that, as dinosaurs slowly slipped into extinction, they were the last ones to notice. It might be the same with marketing research methodologists today. Being a methodologist of sorts myself, it took an unfortunate and seemingly unrelated event to bring the possibility of my professional demise into focus. Recently, the AMA in a rather clumsy way, purged Marketing…
We’re all at a wine tasting, eating cheese, making contacts, posting pictures on Facebook. We’re having such a good time that no one has noticed the rather large elephant standing quietly off to one side. Perhaps, I should say, some at the party may have noticed, but no one is willing to spoil the fun and point out there is…
Take a questionnaire written last week and place it side by side with one written 20, 30 years ago. Chances are they will look identical. Same logic. Same skip patterns. Same batteries and scales. Same limitations. Even though today’s questionnaire is most likely being programmed on the web, with all the new question formats and controls web surveys offer. Yet…
Prior to founding MACRO, Mr. McCullough was the senior vice president for a leading international strategic consulting and design research firm. Before that, he was market research manager for a $300 million division of Levi Strauss & Company.
Mr. McCullough has spoken before the American Marketing Association, the Marketing Research Association and various universities on a wide range of marketing topics. He is a past board member of the American Marketing Association, San Francisco chapter, and has been quoted in Canadian Packaging Magazine. He has chaired and lectured at applied multivariate statistics seminars for several years and is a member of numerous professional associations.