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…
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…
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…
Modern marketing science offers us the chance to see a little more clearly, dig a little deeper, forecast a little more accurately. In some cases, it’s not a little. It’s a lot. We have to understand, however, how the data will be used prior to writing the questionnaire so we can collect data appropriate for the subsequent analysis. Take a…
Focus groups are ubiquitous. In many marketers’ minds the phrase “focus group” is synonymous with the phrase “market research”. Why? Focus groups are easy to understand, easy to set up, fairly quick to turn around and, best of all, the results are almost always, if the moderator has any skills whatsoever, sufficiently vague to support any conclusion the client wants…
Max/Diff has been touted as the savior of ratings data, a miracle cure to the common monadic scale. It’s appealing to our religious belief that all problems will eventually be solved by technology. It’s appealing to our intellectual sense because it’s complicated. And it’s appealing to our sense of justice because we all know that ratings scales simply do a…
If you had a choice (no pun intended) between asking respondents 20 choice questions or just one, which approach would you choose? OK. Now that you’ve picked 20 because you don’t think one choice task is going to yield a sufficiently accurate model, momentarily assume that, with just one choice task per respondent, you could estimate a disaggregate choice model…
We seem, as a culture and society, to have walked through a door. A door, I believe that we may never be able to return through again. We celebrate celebrity. It no longer seems to matter how you became famous. It just matters that you are famous. Party girls, mistresses to the already famous, self-destructive entertainers. No matter how negative…
When online surveys were first introduced to the marketing research community, there was justifiably great excitement and optimism. Online surveys promised numerous and substantive advantages over both phone and mall-intercept interviews: shorter field times, lower costs per interview, virtually complete elimination of interviewer bias, infinitely greater interview process control (e.g., randomizations, customizations, complex yet flawlessly executed skip patterns, logic checks…
In 1911, Charles Coolidge Parlin became the first “real” marketing researcher when he was appointed manager of the commercial research division of the advertising department of the Curtis Publishing Company, thus birthing an industry. Why did this one minor adjustment to the corporate structure of Curtis Publishing spawn an entire industry? Because, in 1911, in its infantile innocence and ignorance,…
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.