Business Research

I Can Find Research to Prove Anything

January 8, 2013

One of these days I’m going to start a new consulting company based on the sad truth that in today’s world a good search turns up nice-looking data to prove anything.  For example, you want eggs to be bad for you? We’ll find research to prove it. No? You want eggs to be good for [...]

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Can Research Make You Dumber?

December 13, 2012

(Reposted with permission from my social media business plans blog) Can research make you dumber? It can if you believe it. I just read Can Facebook Make You Fat and Poor? on Mashable. It’s a post by David Mielach, of BusinessNewsDaily. In particular, the researchers found that social media users were more likely to binge eat and [...]

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How Crazy is Time and Money Spent On This Survey?

October 5, 2012

I just have to say: wow! How much money are they spending on this survey, and how completely useless is it. A couple of pages in, it comes to a page asking me to choose three things from a list of things that this company does better than any other provider.  I balk at that. [...]

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Infographic: Small Business and the US Economy

July 20, 2012

Palo Alto Software’s marketing team prepared this infographic from information provided by 10,000 users of its LivePlan web application for business planning. So that’s not a random list of small business owners, but it is a list of people who have wanting to plan a new business, or grow an existing business, in common. So [...]

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Don’t Expect Truth When You Ask an Entrepreneur

June 5, 2012

I enjoyed this thoroughly and I’ve been meaning to post about since Scott Shane first posted Entrepreneurs’ Job Creation: Expectations Versus Reality on Small Business Trends last March. His chart, shown here below, compares what entrepreneurs said were their hiring expectations to the actual hiring:  You can read the details on Scott’s post. I don’t really care [...]

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What? We Don’t Want Sex? Love? Health? Just Food and Cars?

March 13, 2012

This morning I opened Mashable’s What Men and Women Really Want, According to Social Media, a fun info graphic. You can see the conclusions here, in my illustration. Mine is a tiny clip of their much larger infographic, which has a lot more information. This is a lot of fun. My conclusion, however, is that [...]

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How Contagion Can Help You Forecast Sales

February 6, 2012

Can we talk about beauty in numbers? Amidst all the nervousness about forecasting new products, does it not make sense, and add elegance too, to talk about the classic s-curve we see in nature? So many natural phenomena show an increase along a natural S-curve and bell curve  like the two shown here on the [...]

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Make My Business Analysis Intuitive, Please.

February 3, 2012

Are you thinking type or feeling? Analytical or intuitive? There are studies, there are tests, there’s a whole body of work on personality types dividing people into types. Most of us have heard of this, but if you haven’t, and you’re curious, you could find out more with this google search. It’s about the work [...]

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Asking Your Opinion on Storefront Social Media and Loyalty Programs

January 24, 2012

Are you a store owner in the U.S.? Do you know one? I want your opinion on a few things. I’m working up some data on small stores and payment plans and local loyalty programs for some friends of mine. As part of that, I’ve worked up a quick and easy survey — only 10 [...]

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Infographic: Women in Business

January 13, 2012

Developed by Bolt Insurance

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