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Archive for the ‘Data Processing’ CategoryData Day JobFriday, February 18th, 2011  This week David Ward gives us an insight into his world of data processing. I thought this week I would take the opportunity of a Thursday Night Insight to talk about data processing at B2B International. It’s not something that often gets a lot of mention and I thought a few brief words wouldn’t go amiss. To start with, I should say that I didn’t want to be involved in data processing when I left the University of Salford. Let’s just say it wasn’t my top career choice. I had my eyes set firmly on a career in coastal management. I wanted to design sea defenses and manage coastal erosion. If it wasn’t for the sums of money involved I would have gone to the University of Maryland where I’d been accepted onto a course to complete a Masters degree and, in time, a PhD. However, things don’t always turn out how we would like. From a job working in quality control of EPOS data, to analysis of CRM databases, I slowly made my way into market research and data processing. On the whole it’s been an enjoyable, challenging and, at times, quite an entertaining career. In the eleven years or so that I’ve been in the data processing business, I’ve seen my role in processing the data collected in market research change and evolve. I suppose one of the key areas of change is the diversity of skills that are now required. I think to be successful in the world of data processing it isn’t enough to just focus on one key area now. I used to just focus on producing crosstabs of varying complexity. Then it was crosstabs, data entry and online surveys. Then crosstabs, data entry, online surveys and programming telephone interview scripts. Now at B2B International we have, for some time, been using Confirmit as our data collection tool and so I can now add online reporting into the mix. I wonder if at some point there will come a time when all that is required of someone working in data processing can be provided in one package. Just like the mobile phone with its multiple functions, there seems to me to be a definite trend to try to accommodate all DP requirements in one place. With the likes of Confirmit, Voxco and Globalpark to name but a few, I believe we will get an all-encompassing data processing software package. However, we’re not there yet. These packages do some things very well, and others just about adequately. They are fine for running online survey and CATI projects but would I want to produce a set of complex tables using the same software? Currently I would have to say no; they don’t do everything well enough. I suspect it won’t be too long before I would answer yes. However, until I can answer yes to this question, data processing at B2B International will continue to utilise whatever combination of different but complementary tools we need to provide a first rate service for our researchers. Data processing is something we at B2B International take very seriously. We invest in the tools we need to do the job well and we invest in the skills needed to get the most out of these tools. It’s an important piece of the market research pie and, as head of data processing, I get a lot of satisfaction in knowing that it’s service we can provide to the highest standards. So, whether you want to run a customer satisfactioncustomer satisfaction study, a segmentation study, a multi country or a multi wave tracking project, your data is in safe hands. Bringing Data Into VisionFriday, January 14th, 2011
In this week’s Thursday Night Insight, Oliver Truman tells us how a night in front of the box provided an insight into presenting market research data. The bitterly cold, dystopian winter suffered by most of the Northern Hemisphere recently has given me the perfect opportunity to indulge one of my favourite pastimes: The fine art of staying in of an evening. Just as summer is characterised (some might say romanticised) by long, action-packed days outdoors and lobbing another shrimp on the ‘barbie, winter presents the perfect opportunity to over-indulge and be lazy. This includes the doyen of all inert pleasures, slobbing out in front of the television. When I’m over visiting our US office, I am spoilt for choice with latest episodes of my favourite stateside shows. Whether it’s gritty crime procedurals like the Law and Order franchise, comedies like 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm or rollicking police brutality courtesy of “Sheriff” John Burnell in World’s Wildest Police Videos, there’s sure to be something that tickles my fancy. And when back in Blighty, there’s nothing quite like a weekend afternoon spent watching the telly, shouting obscenities at overpaid men kicking around a bag of wind. The researcher reading all of the above could be forgiven for segmenting my viewing behaviour, and putting me squarely in the “Trash TV” bucket. However, I do occasionally like to indulge my intellectual side. This typically consists of gamely attempting to get a single correct answer in University Challenge, employing such stellar strategies as “shout Verdi whenever there’s a question about opera”. (This worked. Once.). In the UK, the BBC have set up an entire channel devoted to worthy, arts-based but ultimately under-watched programming – the sorts of programmes I should be watching. It’s called BBC4. In a recent surf around the electronic programme schedule, I happened across a programme they had on entitled The Beauty Of Diagrams. The market-research-report-writing part of my brain couldn’t resist. This particular episode in a series of six was about Florence Nightingale. It turned out that not only was the Lady of the Lamp a celebrated nurse, she also had a gift for statistics and the visual presentation of data. In her studies of sanitary conditions during the Crimean War, Nightingale took great interest in statistics related to soldier mortality rates and causes, convinced that observations on the ground could somehow be proven powerfully by data. William Farr, then Compiler of Abstracts at the General Registry Office, had long put together tables of data related to the deaths of soldiers in combat. However, Nightingale was not looking for a straightforward, sober presentation of the facts as many of her contemporaries might have chosen to do. She wanted impact to ensure that her work effected real change. In her 1858 monograph Notes on matters affecting the health, efficiency and hospital administration of the British army Nightingale produced one of the first of that most celebrated diagrams – the pie chart. Although William Playfair could probably lay claim to the first pie diagram around 50 years earlier, “Nightingale’s Rose” (shown below, click the preview for a larger version) nonetheless showed dramatically and accessibly the impact that infectious diseases had on mortality rates in the theatre of war. Each segment of the pie represented a month, with the size of coloured segments within each sector being roughly proportional to the cause of death: Blue denotes death from infectious disease, red indicates mortality due to wounding and black shows all other causes.
The sheer magnitude of the blue sectors, their peak and then subsequent decay with the introduction of better sanitation gave strong visual testimony to the ends that Nightingale was seeking to achieve. At the same time, however, the diagram was also an exaggeration of the true picture. The sectors were not proportional in area to the rate of mortality, rather the data was mapped to the radius of each segment. By having the blue infectious disease sector as the outermost portion, Nightingale had (unwittingly or otherwise) exploited the geometry of the circle to subtly accentuate certain parts of the data. As this article shows, when Nightingale’s Rose is recalibrated to show area alone, the effect is far less pronounced. Leaving aside the precise accuracy of Nightingale’s diagram, the wider point to make is that appropriate presentation of data is a vital component of report writing, both in general but especially in our realm of market research. A compelling piece of market intelligence relies not only on storytelling, but also our ability to paint vivid, memorable, but nonetheless accurate representations of the data we have gathered. The discipline of data visualisation is a growing one, particularly in an era of ever-more-complex computer graphics capabilities. I’ll leave you with some of my favourite examples of data visualisation from around the web:
If there are any further examples you’d like to share, please contribute them using our comment section below. And, who knows, these might just provide the inspiration for B2B’s next market research report – just as a lazy night in front of the telly provided food for thought! Does Research Tell You Anything New?Monday, April 12th, 2010
 We like Luke Johnson’s column in the Financial Times and regularly feature it on our blog. He is something of a hero of ours, having built up Pizza Express, become exceedingly rich as a private equity investor, and proved to be an astute commentator on entrepreneurial issues. It was with a sinking heart that we read the article he wrote about focus groups in the Financial Times last week. Luke Johnson singled out focus groups for criticism but in truth his points could be applied to any type of market research. He claims that market research he commissioned told him very little that he did not already know. This will not be an unknown observation to many market research practitioners reading this blog. They will have often times presented a detailed and thorough piece of research with many incisive findings and sharp recommendations, only to hear some member of the audience claim that there was nothing new in it for them. One way round this would be to ask everyone who attends a market research presentation to bring with them a sealed envelope in which they summarise their pre-understanding of the market so that it can be compared with the findings of the research survey. When market research findings are laid out in a clear structure it is quite likely (and quite right) that much of what is said will concur with existing knowledge. However, without the market research, the knowledge may be uncoordinated and there could be many internal disputes about where the marketing priorities lie. A good piece of research that confirms knowledge and places it in a framework that everyone understands, can be worth its weight in gold. However, there is another issue that is worth considering. There is an old saying that “a problem defined is a problem half solved”. In other words, a good brief, which clearly lays out the problem to be researched, is critical in delivering findings that resonate. In the case outlined by Luke Johnson, an obvious question we would ask is “what were the focus groups seeking to achieve?”. Focus groups work best as an exploratory tool, possibly forming the first stage of a larger program. Were the focus groups used as a single research solution to something that should have had a qualitative stage followed by a quantitative stage? We don’t know, but we do know that there is a dangerous tendency to commission focus groups as a stand-alone research solution when they should be just one component part. We shall carry on reading and promoting Luke Johnson’s articles because he challenges all and everything around him and we like that. However, on this occasion Luke, we think you may have been a tad hard on the market researchers and maybe you should also challenge yourself — did the research really tell you nothing worth knowing, and did you really give the researchers the right brief? Read on.
Why focus groups tell you the obvious By Luke Johnson I recently commissioned some market research and, as is too often the case, it told me what I already knew or was obvious. I paid the bill of several tens of thousands of pounds, consoling myself with the fact that the work at least confirmed my prejudices – always a satisfying sensation. But I also sensed I had received very poor value; and in talking to other clients of research companies, I realise quite a few feel the same way. As Michael Skapinker wrote yesterday, the idea that the customer is always right has become an accepted truth in business. Unfortunately, customer desires are often wholly unrealistic – because of cost, technology or legislation. As Henry Ford said at the launch of the Model T: “If I’d asked the customer, he’d have asked for a faster horse.” I remember Peter Boizot, founder of PizzaExpress and my predecessor as chairman, telling me how, in 1965, customers in his Soho pizzeria felt uncomfortable with authentic Italian pizza – and demanded chips. But he stuck to his vision and guided their tastes to the genuine product. I have also experienced data blindness over research studies. Consultancies supply blizzards of material – far more than could ever be useful. Wordy, sprawling PowerPoint presentations compensate for a lack of incisive thinking. One can end up paralysed with indecision, buried in e-mails too large to even download. Great breakthroughs in fields such as new product development are frequently achieved by avoiding surveys and committees altogether. Constant testing can lead to blandness and safety-first choices. In creative affairs, corporate brainstorming sessions usually end up with groupthink dullness, all originality squeezed out because of the fear of failure or through the influence of office politics. As Steve Jobs said: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” At Channel 4, many of the most brilliant and distinctive programme ideas during my time as chairman were pioneered by eccentric independent producers who were championed by renegade commissioners. Meanwhile expensive, mainstream concepts often flopped. Over the decades since I worked in advertising, I have sat in many focus groups and wondered about the quality and effectiveness of such qualitative research. After all, who submits to a two-hour discussion about brands of washing-up liquid? All too often, the answer is the lonely, the old, the unemployed, students and, most worrying of all, serial participants in search of the small stipend and free tea and biscuits. It is very hard to persuade a normal working person to attend such panels, but they are usually the target subjects. I worry that researchers who appear to succeed are too often the snazzy firms who trade in sexy stereotyping. They use phrases like “Inner City Adversity” and “Twilight Subsistence” to categorise and supposedly understand various imagined socioeconomic and demographic groups. I am unconvinced that this terminology and philosophy is especially practical and relevant for many companies. In my restaurants, the people who know our customers are not researchers but branch managers, who serve the public all day, every week. Our staff may not have the slick patter, but they have the frontline, first-hand knowledge. Another unfortunate byproduct of the growth of research has been the increasing use of surveys by political and charitable organisations in their campaigns. Almost every day a pressure group gets publicity by publishing selective and scary conclusions about poverty, health, discrimination or other controversial issues. Journalists rarely question the study methods or validity of the results. Even if there were no errors in the sampling techniques, questionnaires or systems used, the media often over-simplify and exaggerate outcomes. Over-reliance on researchers means owners and managers are separated from the consumer. Successful entrepreneurs I know put more effort in talking to customers themselves, than they do working with costly experts who tell them what they should have learned long before. Faster, faster, faster…Friday, July 17th, 2009
When I used to work at a well known bank, bouncing cheques and cancelling payments for those unlucky people frequently going beyond their credit allowance, a colleague and line manager of the team I worked in used to have what I suppose you could call a catchphrase. He would walk up behind an unsuspecting member of the team and utter the following words… Faster, faster, faster… must go faster! I never really understood whether or not this was his bizarre motivational technique gleaned from reading a book on people management or whether he really was just irritating. Who knows? Maybe it was both. His catchphrase sums up well a trend that I have noticed in my 10+ years in data processing and market research Market research has always, as far as I can tell, been a fast-paced business. And this is very true for those working in data processing, especially as computing power and techniques in processing data improve. The time between questionnaire sign-off to CATI or e-survey setup seems to shrink, as does the time between fieldwork ending and the delivery of cross tabs. Everything has to be as thoroughly checked and accurate as before. It just needs to be delivered that little bit quicker. Over 10 years I think this is an undeniable trend. Ever since I joined B2B International, I’ve looked at ways to improve the turnaround times in data processing that allow us to keep meeting our clients’ expectations. There are many ways of doing this. For example, we can invest in new software, as we have recently with Confirmit for our e-surveys and QPS Insight to allow us to carry out data entry more efficiently. We can also use the software we currently have more wisely, such as writing VBA scripts in Excel to automate certain tasks. Whatever the method we use to meet this challenge, it is a challenge I enjoy. Having said that, I often ask myself whether there will come a point when people working in our industry will start to have to say no more often. Will the time come when the speed of delivery will start to have some detrimental effect on all-round quality of research carried out, and at what point does the trade-off between quality and speed become acceptable? At B2B International we’re well placed to deal with the challenges that market research throws at us. A combination of a strong team, smart thinking, and a constant drive to improve the way we work means we haven’t yet reached the point where “no” is something we have to say very often – and long may that continue! |
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