Category Archives: research

Do we really know what we think we know? How can we know?

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Prediction is a big, big business these days, and even those of us who aren’t explicitly in the prediction business probably do all we can to make sense of the future. Does your company do marketing research? Do you track the financial pages? Do you keep abreast of the latest innovations in your industry (or any industry, for that matter)? If so – and most of you probably answered yes to at least one of these questions – then that’s all part of what I’m calling the prediction business. In a nutshell, the more we know about the future, the more likely we are to make decisions that succeed in the present and the future, and we all want that.

So, how good are we at predicting? How much of what we think we know is accurate, and how reliable are our techniques for predicting? Perhaps not as good as we’d hope. Consider a recent BBC story on efforts to detect terrorists. It starts out with a promising premise: what if you had a method that was 90% effective? Not bad, right? But then the analysis takes a nasty left turn. Continue reading →

New report says mobile use higher among older users than previously thought; yes, but…

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A new report from InsightExpress suggests that mobile penetration and use may be much higher than widely thought.

Key points:

  • …mobile penetration was high across all ages, at 85% and 82% for Gens Y and X, respectively–meanwhile, 80% of younger Boomers surveyed had a mobile phone, followed closely by older Boomers at 79%.
  • Boomers’ handsets were just as cutting edge as their younger counterparts, as 75% of younger Boomers and 68% of older Boomers had phones that supported text messaging–compared to 86% and 82% of Gens Y and X, respectively.
  • Gen Y led the pack in actual text-message usage with 43%, followed by Gen X with 22%–but some 16% of all younger Boomers and 10% of all older Boomers sent or received text messages daily. Continue reading →

New report notices that Boomers are retiring; offers band-aid for sucking chest wound…

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Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the looming macro-succession crisis, and it’s felt like I’m the only one who sees the issue coming. This morning, though, a MediaPost item addressing a piece of the issue came across the desk, and while it’s only partially aware of the whole problem and the solution it points to is a half-measure at best, it’s at least nice to see a little validation on the subject.

Thursday July 12, 2007
Retiring Boomers Important in Hand-off to Younger Employees

A recent survey of 28,000 employers in 25 countries, by Manpower, revealed that only 21 percent have implemented retention strategies to keep their senior employees participating in the workforce. Continue reading →

The problem with measurement

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In yesterday’s MediaPost Marketing Daily, Douglas Brooks touched on a subject I’ve been yarping about for some time – measurement. He offers some prudent advice, but sidesteps the issue that’s been bothering me: to wit, our rage to quantification is driven by fear, not expertise, and it often leads us to ignore a whole suite of important decision-making tools.

I would never suggest that ROI doesn’t matter – quite the opposite – and I also wouldn’t argue that quantitative methods can’t provide us with useful data – of course they can. The problem is that American culture has this odd relationship with knowledge and evidence – in any kind of professional enterprise, statistics and numerical metrics are increasingly being taken as the only kind of evidence. If we want to say something about our customer base, we feel an obligation to quantify whatever we’re trying to say. Continue reading →

US companies underperforming on reputation index?

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There’s a lot to be suspicious about anytime you come across a survey-based measure of reputation, especially when you’re working across all kind of international borders and trying to normalize for dramatically different sets of local and regional assumptions about how businesses ought to work. But even given this, the results from a new Reputation Institute study of corporate reputations raise some questions.

Mainly, how come American companies didn’t do better? Continue reading →

Text is king, and it’s going to stay that way for awhile

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Recently I was sort of explaining the business to a friend whose knowledge and perceptions about the mobility market were probably pretty common. Like a lot of people I’ve talked to, she sort of looked suspiciously at my suggestion that any effective marketing, advocacy or content play was going to need to be based in SMS (text messaging).

But what about Blackberries and all the phones that stream higher-order content, she wondered. She was under the fairly common misperception that penetration of these technologies is a lot greater than it actually is. For example, what do you think the penetration of WAP-addressable handsets is? Continue reading →