Business Research

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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Franchise King Echoes Mark Twain on Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

January 5, 2012

What I really like about Franchise King Joel Libava’s post Shocking Facts About Franchising Success Rates Revealed is how clearly he calls out the sleazy or sloppy (take your choice) use of very old statistics to mislead and entice people. He concludes: A simple scan of some of the cheaper-looking websites that some of the franchise [...]

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Pictures Proving Pictures Can’t Prove Anything

December 27, 2011

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this much eloquence in both words and pictures. It’s a great illustration of how a good picture is worth a thousand words, and then again, maybe also why it isn’t always. That’s Correlation or Causation? on BusinessWeek.com. The words: Need to prove something you already believe? All you [...]

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Stop. Don’t Do That Survey. Talk to People Instead.

November 28, 2011

Yes, there are some amazing tools for doing market surveys quickly and easy. I use SurveyMonkey myself, very happily. And I know of (but don’t have reason to use) cool tools to send surveys to selected groups of respondents. But there’s a problem with that, especially if you overuse it. Most surveys are seriously flawed. [...]

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Do You Believe Your Analytics?

November 23, 2011

What I hate about analytics ia that sometimes numbers are wrong or misleading, but when they are numbers, we’re not supposed to argue. I like analysis when it adds information and context to human decisions. What we have now as analytics available for marketing and web development is amazing, especially compared to the “olden days” [...]

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Does the New York Tech Boom Have Clues for Everywhere Else?

November 3, 2011

It was Wednesday night, a full auditorium at the 92nd St. Y in Manhattan’s upper East Side. We’d had a meeting in the late afternoon, got tied up, so we arrived late and took the only two seats left, against the wall. Even the balcony was full. The audience was a total mixup of suits, [...]

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