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Archive for the ‘Surveys’ CategoryNext Entries »Party Like A Research-star!Friday, January 15th, 2010 
As we settle into the new year, Eve Lenkowsky reflects on how a little holiday-season market research could have saved on a lot of leftover pizza… If you came to visit me at my place this week, you might begin to think I have an alcohol problem. And a cookie hoarding problem. And a really big purple carpet stain problem. That’s because, this year, my boyfriend Mike and I decided it would be fun for us to host a New Year’s Eve party for our friends. About a month before the party, he made up his guest list, and I made up mine, and then we sent out an e-mail invitation and waited for the responses to flow in. People responded either yes, no, or maybe (on the evite, the choices were ‘I’ll drink to that,’ ‘My glass is empty,’ or ‘I might raise a glass’) and then, a few days before the party, we began to hunker down and prepare for the big event. At least 16 people were coming, and we were going to give them a good time, gosh darn-it! Mike and I had recently been guests at an amazing Halloween house party held by some friends, so we decided to pull out all the stops too. We ran to our local liquor store and stocked up on enough alcohol to get us through another Prohibition. We went to the party supply store and came home with tons of silly party hats & headbands, glow sticks, confetti, and plastic ‘Happy New Year-inscribed’ eating ware. We filled up two shopping carts at the supermarket and ordered 6 pies of pizza on the big night (anticipating that each person could be hungry enough to eat 3 slices: hence 16 people x 3 slices = 48 slices, then 48 slices/8 slices per pizza pie = 6 pizza pies). We also rearranged all of our furniture, laundered our extra blankets at the dry cleaners, and vacuumed to high heaven in order to accommodate however number of friends that would decide to sleep over. We truly could not estimate this, but I had visions of people sleeping head to toe in the hallways and on the floor next to my humming refrigerator. Fortunately, I know how to be the hostess with the most-ess and Mike sure can entertain, so things pretty much went off without a hitch. People joked around with each other, made new friends, played a bunch of games, listened to some great tunes, watched the Times Square ball drop on t.v., and ate and drank in a celebratory manner. HOWEVER, there were a few things that we did not anticipate and they all centered around the same theme – we went overboard! For example, even though we’d bought two types of cookies, three more of our friends brought even more cookies to the party. Also, it turned out that many of our friends had gone to dinner before they arrived, so only 3 out of the 6 pizza pies were even opened – completely counter to our fears that we would run out. Our booze supply overflowethed to the point that we were begging our friends to take home bottles of alcohol at the end of the night. Lastly, while the party hats and noisemakers were certainly popular, I’d guess only about 2/3 of our guests actually were into them.
So while we were cleaning up after the party the next day, it dawned on me that we could have saved a lot of strategizing, money, preparation, and clean-up had I used some of the tactics I use as a market researcher here at B2B International. I write questionnaires every day; why don’t I sent out a quick survey to our friends next time I host a party?? That way, I won’t have to guess what they want – wasting time, money, and resources – and can get even closer to making my friends happy and anticipating their behavior by asking them directly. In fact, I believe my survey will incorporate some of the following questions and go a little something like this:
Booze & Food Fun & Games So that’s my little survey draft. You can do the same thing for your next party and write up a simple survey (but leave the more intensive business-to-business market research to the professionals). Feel free to borrow questions from my list, or come up with some of your own – whatever you think is relevant to your situation. Follow the tactics of the wisest business leaders and marketing managers who, even though they understand their industry really well, know it’s always worth it to ask the opinions of current and potential customers directly. Even if you think you know your friends and guests really well, they probably know themselves better. An added bonus: your friends will be glad you asked these questions because it will help them prepare for the big day themselves! Well, that’s all the insight I’ve got for today. Now I’m going to try for a second time to scrub this wine stain out of my carpet while Mike tries to pawn off some vodka gimlets on our next door neighbors.
Feelings and forecastFriday, August 14th, 2009
With so many people interested in the state of the economy, Alaric Fairbanks this week takes a look at some of the more unusual indicators which may tell us whether prospects are looking up. Even – perhaps especially – here in Beijing, as elsewhere, not a day goes by without mention of the economy and how quickly it will recover or not. Supplementary to this are the business confidence or climate surveys and their subsequent reports of optimism and pessimism. These are all very well, and may be a good source of column inches or publicity for a research company. This is all OK with me but, even if reflective of whatever business community or industry sector’s level of confidence, it is perhaps worth thinking about which sources of information are behind, say, agreement with a statement expecting an increase in profit, revenue, headcount, etc. From examples I have seen, including, I confess, a climate survey we conducted, there is little attention paid to the sources of information upon which these feelings are based. When it does appear, it is usually a choice of ‘respectable’ sources, such as newspapers, journals, or official statistics. Less expected or rational influences are often overlooked and, even if included in the question set, a respondent may not admit to having been influenced by an alternative or informal source. Of course, it would be great for our business if businesspeople took tailored market research as their main source of guidance for decisions and even opinions, but as this is not always the case, I was curious as to what observations people were making to inform their levels of confidence. To this end we spoke informally to contacts in the Western business community about any indicators used to reflect on their business prospects. A common theme emerged around indicators being derived from the physical environment, especially through observation. A simple example of an informal indicator was counting or estimating the number of new building sites passed on the way to work – the more new sites, the stronger the economic prospects. These conversations suggested that observations were aimed at levels of activity. They tended be a mixture of fairly Beijing-specific and the more general. Observed indicators from work and life in Beijing with a perceived positive correlation included:
And with a perceived negative correlation:
Interestingly, although not all of these are anecdotally based, they all appear to have some underlying rationale. It would be interesting, at least to me, to look into how effective these indicators really are… but things are fairly hectic here at the moment, what with projects, proposals, etc – another way of showing how things are going right now! Next Entries » |
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