Please contact us directly when applying for a job

If you would like to apply for the moderator job, please contact us directly and don’t send your resume through a recruiter.

Our Human Resources team does a great job of recruiting and screening candidates, so we don’t use recruiters. Consequently, we have ignored resumes sent to us by recruiters.

We apologize if you have been overlooked because of this policy. If a recruiter has tried to contact us on your behalf, please discuss our policy with them before submitting your resume directly to us. The recruiter will receive no credit for finding you if you get hired.

In the future, we will explicitly state this policy in our job descriptions.

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Social Media’s Reality Distortion Field

Photo by Shannon Kringen

People who worked for Steve Jobs sometimes talked about his “reality distortion field” that forced them to look at the world differently, often challenging them to do things that they previously thought impossible. I’d like to thank Janet F-H for recently turning my attention to a different reality distortion field that surrounds social media research.

A recent article discussed how social media analysis did a poor job of predicting the results of Super Tuesday in the Republican primary. Some of the research flaws could be characterized as sample frame bias, such as not knowing whether the authors of social media posts are likely to vote in the primary, or even if they are Republicans. Thus, it’s hard to know which sentiments gleaned from social media are relevant to predicting a primary vote. Furthermore, the demographics of social media usage are quite different from the demographics of voters in the Republican primary.

So far, we have characterized the people who have access to social media. However, active participation in social media is a different story. Have you noticed that 90% of the posts on your Facebook wall seem to come from 10% of your friends? Obviously, some people are much more active in posting than others, which means that the demographic/psychographic profile of sampling posts could be very different from the profile of sampling people in social media.

Wouldn’t some demographic weighting help? A former colleague did a study, several years ago, where he showed that the demographics and psychographics of active online participants were quite different from the general population, sampled by more traditional methods, such as telephone and mail research. (Although web usage is more mainstream today, the same principles apply.) When he used demographics to weight the results to the general population, he found that the psychographics skewed even worse. Some biases cannot be simply weighted away.

Even if sampling problems could be solved, there is a fundamental flaw in sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is often automated by computational algorithms, but even the best algorithms are only about 70% accurate in predicting positive vs. negative sentiment. That’s still useful if you’re using a social media dashboard to focus your attention on negative comments as part of a routine scan of social media to manage PR. As a research tool, this is inadequate, so sentiment analysis should be performed by humans who can understand humor, sarcasm, nuance, and online abbreviations.

Social media analysis is a useful new tool, but it complements other forms of marketing research, rather than replacing the latter. As professional marketing researchers, we know that qualitative studies may be useful for generating hypotheses, yet their small sample sizes are not necessarily representative of the general population. Social media analysis can be even less representative at times, despite the false comfort of sampling large numbers of posts.


For several years, studies of marketing executives have revealed a strong desire to incorporate social media into the marketing toolbox, but also anxiety about not knowing how to effectively harness social media. In future articles, I shall explore the ways that marketing research can work hand-in-hand with social media and digital marketing.

Mario  

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K.I.S.S.

Photo by Sezzles

No, not that K.I.S.S. I mean the “Keep It Simple Stupid” principle, articulated by Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works. The Skunk Works designed some of the world’s most sophisticated, high-performance aircraft under Johnson’s leadership (e.g. the U-2 and the SR-71), but he believed in simplicity as a design principle. K.I.S.S. meant that his planes should be repairable by average mechanics with available tools under combat conditions.

Blueberry lives by Einstein’s rule of work: “Out of clutter find simplicity.” Marketing research studies yield mountains of data that we must boil down to a few powerful and easily understood ideas that a client can use to manage their business. Our direct clients are usually sophisticated marketing researchers who understand the complexities of data analysis, but our ideas must engage and motivate non-researchers who simply want to solve practical business problems.

K.I.S.S. can also serve as a design philosophy for marketing research studies. We have helped some clients to develop guidelines to ensure that all innovations are tested at stagegates. Disruptive innovations are tested at multiple stages of innovation, screening, refining and optimizing, based on many prototypes and relatively large numbers of respondents. Incremental line extensions may receive just a short qualitative test of a few late-stage prototypes to verify that they will do no harm. The trick is to stretch a limited research budget to ensure that no product/package/ad is hastily launched without consumer feedback.

Even when budget limitations aren’t tight, do you really need to test fifty diagnostic attributes? Perhaps a short test would minimize respondent fatigue and provide higher quality data. Is a structural equation model really going to provide better guidance than a simple regression with a handful of well-chosen attributes? A little forethought could reduce redundancy in the model beforehand, rather than deducing redundancy as an academic exercise. Your audience might thank you.

Less is more.

Mario 

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Under Pressure

Research tends to be a careful profession, populated by people who care about details. Research often gets used by people who are less fussy about precision. A case in point was the news stating that 55% of Syrians thought that President Assad should not resign.

There were many problems with this statistic. First, a more detailed report clarified that half of those saying that President Assad should not resign, actually wanted him to guarantee free democratic elections in the near future—hardly a clear sign of support. Second, only 98 respondents were from Syria, so the majority opinion was unclear within a statistical margin of error. Third, only 18% of people in Syria have access to the internet, so this poll was far from being representative of the general population.

Nevertheless, several major news organizations ran the story. News is about marketing interesting stories. Marketing researchers are also under pressure to find and tell an interesting story, but it’s our job to restrain the abuse of data (to an extent reasonably possible).

We take great care in deciding, for example, whether a study should represent current customers or general category buyers. Will we have enough sample to draw conclusions from specific comparisons? Should we advise our clients to reduce the number of concepts/products in a test so that we can avoid respondent fatigue and more clearly distinguish the effects of experimental variables?  We sometimes feel pressure to go along to get along, but we must not forget that our clients trust in us to provide sound advice that protects their careers and helps their businesses to grow.

Mario

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ULTAmite Focus on the Customer

I recently saw Chuck Rubin, CEO of ULTA Beauty, address an audience of Cosmetics Executive Women in NYC. Over and over, he talked about “her” and what “she” wants. Who is she? She is ULTA’s customer.

His repeated references to her suggest that understanding their customer is at the heart of everything ULTA does. Moreover the specificity and detail of Chuck Rubin’s remarks suggest purposeful integration of consumer insights into engineering the customer’s in-store experience: “We tailor the experience to what the customer wants and also enhance brand equity of the brands we carry.” ULTA knows precisely what they stand for and how they are different from that other cosmetics retailer that begins with an “S.”

“Part of our success goes back to the focus on our customer, the offerings and how we present them. That focus is the driving force,” he observed. Here is a CEO cultivating an inquisitive way of doing business that will produce sustainable competitive advantage.


(More detailed coverage of the event can be found at GCI Magazine.)


Mario

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Out of Clutter Find Simplicity

Blueberry is guided by one of Einstein’s rule of work: “Out of clutter find simplicity.” Today I would like to look at the clutter. We start with mountains of data, immerse ourselves in it, think about it, talk about it, ask coworkers for feedback, and refine our ideas until clear patterns and a compelling story emerge.

On some projects, we literally surround ourselves with data. Sometimes we use The War Room, which is a large interior conference room with a whole wall of whiteboard. In the first photograph, we see Lisa and Ashley in full immersion, surrounded by summary charts for each of the concepts we tested in a study. Several days of immersion led to the “aha!” moments when ideas suddenly fit. Near the end, they presented data, implications, and tentative recommendations to fellow 'berries' who weren’t working on this project, providing an outsider’s perspective.

In the second photo, Lisa and Ashley are sorting consumers’ collages and stories on the floor. We have a large expanse of floor where we lay out the collages and stories, grouping them into themes and building a physical map on the floor, with thematic dimensions. Every now and then, a passing colleague gets pulled in to verify or elaborate the patterns we see.

In the third photo, Ashley wanted to see the big picture, so she got up on a chair to view the map of collages. Even though we also have modern electronic tools for data coding and visualization, it really helps to physically get our hands dirty, mucking through the data in search of beauty.

The lotus flower is an enduring symbol of transformation in Buddhist teachings. Its roots are in the mud, but its strong stem rises high above the water, elevating a beautiful fragrant flower. So it is with our consumer insights, rooted in the muck of data but rising up to reveal a simple yet beautiful pattern that compels us to think differently about the world.

Mario

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The High Cost of Cutting Corners

I loved Netflix as an exemplar of innovation and understanding the consumer, so it pained me to see their recent struggles.   Hindsight is 20/20, but a little consumer research should have provided the foresight to predict that their new prices and their plan to split the company would be disastrous. 

Along the same lines, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board has been embarrassed by the failure of its wine kiosk program.  This program put vending machines in grocery stores to augment sales from state-run liquor stores. Unfortunately, demand was much less than their kiosk vendor had led them to expect. The PLCB admitted that it did not do consumer research to predict and influence consumer acceptance of this new technology.

These miscalculations of consumer reactions are not only embarrassing for the decision makers, but they are costly in terms of corporate reputation, brand equity, and launch investment. The success of these decisions may have seemed assured to managers, since it’s only too easy to give into organizational groupthink, especially if a senior executive thinks it’s a good idea. Evidence and critical thinking would have better served these companies.

Blueberry has helped its clients to make several last-minute saves over the past year. For example, a food manufacturer was ready to launch new flavors when a factory worker spoke up and questioned whether there was something wrong with the product. We conducted consumer product tests, which showed that consumers also didn’t like these flavors. Fortunately, our insights suggested quick fixes for one flavor and specific guidance to refine the others. Yet another consumer product company was ready to replace a line of small appliances with a new model. They asked us to conduct focus groups to get enthusiastic consumer quotes to share with retail buyers. Those quotes weren’t very positive.  Our client went back to the drawing board understanding what needed to be improved. As you might imagine, there were some tense moments among these client teams, but at least they had the opportunity to improve their products before a costly new product launch.


Our economy still hasn’t recovered, so it’s very tempting to cut the marketing research budget and rush innovations to store shelves. Sometimes the untested product succeeds, but what is the cost of failure? How much are you investing in a product launch? What is the opportunity cost of products that could have been even more successful if the product development team had refined the product? What if the marketing team had better guidance to design packaging, advertising, and retail displays that harmoniously enhance the consumer experience?

The cost of failure is too high. Even if you can only afford a couple of focus groups, don’t make major innovation or marketing decisions without consumer feedback. Most of the time, you get constructive guidance to refine your ideas. Sometimes, you simply have to avoid a really bad idea. Knowing this is always a good thing.

Mario

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