Archive for the ‘Market Research News’ Category
Which are the top market research firms?
A question regularly asked by many readers of my blog and people interested in market research. Although many manufacturers themselves perform market research and have good market research departments, there is a broad range of companies that have specialised themselves in market research. Some of them have specialised themselves into specific fields like consumer research, others operate in all fields from desk research, via online research to EPOS data research.
Due to the strong dynamics, competition and take overs between market research agencies, this list probably is outdated within the next year.
But I have found the following top 9 research companies based upon their international turnover in USD for 2009
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Microsoft scraps plans to acquire Yahoo!
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has confirmed it is no longer in discussions to acquire Yahoo! However, he says Microsoft is now looking to collaborate with the internet company.
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The Weird Visitors
Why aren’t my visitors clicking on this link? Why aren’t they following these steps in my conversion funnel? Why is this landing page failing to engender the numbers of leads I expected?
We’ve all posed these questions to ourselves thousands of times. How could the process or architecture of our website fail when it’s designed so rationally? The first explanation that springs to mind is that we as site operators are out of touch that our grand schemes don’t resonate with our visitors and as a result, our pages founder.
Being out of touch with visitors is a theme of many dissertations emanating from influential voices in our space. At the heart of this argument is the following thesis: the visitors know what they want, and matching content, flow, and functionality to their desires is the road to optimum site performance.
But what if visitors don’t know what they want; what if visitors are profoundly irrational? Take any web analytics application and look for the irregularities. Look for the weird visitor paths: visitors reloading pages over and over, visitors pursuing bizarre and circuitous routes to certain events, visitors spending inordinate amounts of time on trivial pages.
Browser Wars: Internet Explorer Doing Well On Retail & E-Commerce Sites
GetClicky, which is one of the most reliable sources of this kind of information, currently has Internet Explorer running at an average daily market share of about 58% for the first thirteen days of November, with Firefox running at a market share of about 32% over the same time period.
We ran our own numbers, looking at browser market share for a panel of 50,000 respondents, culled from 4Q surveys running on retail & e-commerce websites.
User Experience Misconceptions Debunked
Forrester recently attended the UI13 Conference for customer experience professionals. At the conference, leading practitioners and researchers discussed the latest tools and techniques that help companies improve their design and customer experience. Conference speakers also tried to dispel some destructive myths that are cropping up in the user experience community.
These include beliefs that customer experience is the sole domain of the design team, that user research and testing have to be expensive, that personas guarantee success, and that designs have to be right the first time because once they are complete, they do not need to be updated for several years.
To keep design processes on track, Forrester recommends that companies begin by using low-cost techniques on small projects, employing iterative design and testing techniques, and charting a path to Experience-Based Differentiation.
Research Awards 2008 Shortlists announced
The MRS has unveiled an impressive line-up of finalists for this year’s Research Awards â?? after receiving the highest ever number of entries.
The winners will be announced during the Research Awards the industry’s annual celebration of success – which is taking place on 8 December 2008 at The Royal Lancaster Hotel, Hyde Park, London.
Booking is now open.
In Praise of Online Advertising
This blog post originally appeared as my column in MediaPost’s Online Metrics Insider on August 19.
In my last Metrics Insider column, I wrote about the question of how advertising works. The column generated some great comments, and I got some very thoughtful responses via email; some of you even sent me papers on different components of ad effectiveness measurement. This week, I want to revisit the topic, and perhaps amplify a few points.