At the University of Wisconsin, back in the days of purple flares, paisley patterned shirts, marijuana and Watergate, a story circulated among the statisticians. It was said that a leading toothpaste manufacturer had given some twenty different universities the same brief. The task: to research users of their toothpaste and that of their major competitor. [...]

Albert Einstein famously said that “God does not play dice”. Einstein’s statement was based on his dissatisfaction with quantum theory, a theory to which he had paradoxically contributed a great deal.
Einstein never really accepted quantum theory as established science because quantum mechanics could not calculate the behavior of an individual particle and also because quantum [...]

Statistics are based in probability. The mathematics of probability is both simple and confusingly complex. Let us take a simple example: A coin has been tossed four times and landed heads up each time. The probability of five heads in a row is 1/32. So what odds should we receive if we bet that [...]

I once read that Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, lets his thoughts wander for recreation into eleven dimensions. Having read his Brief History of Time I have no doubt that Professor Hawking’s journeys into eleven dimensions are far more profound than mine; but as researchers we are all familiar with more [...]

Sir Ronald Fisher, an Englishman, was pre-eminent among statisticians of the early twentieth century.  Sir Ronald maintained that there is no proof that smoking causes lung cancer. Sir Ronald smoked cigarettes. The inventor of the analysis of variance was quite right in his assertion that there is no scientific proof that smoking causes lung cancer.
In [...]

This paper examines the defects of focus group research and suggests that a better alternative to focus group research is web-based surveys using the well-established Delphi Technique.
Qualitative research is an important part of marketing research today. When marketing managers say “we’ll do some qual” they almost always mean focus groups. Other types of qualitative research [...]

Web-based surveys are becoming increasingly popular in marketing and social science research. The developing interest in Web-based surveying is not surprising as the Internet becomes an ever more useful, familiar and widely used means of communication.
Web-based surveying offers a number of advantages over more traditional CATI and mail techniques. Web-based surveys are faster and cheaper [...]

Conjoint analysis is one of the most popular quantitative methods in Marketing Research. The popularity of Conjoint Analysis is well deserved. Conjoint Analysis has in many cases replaced concept testing because it is more effective.
The problems with traditional product testing were shown dramatically in 1985 when Coca Cola carried out market research at a cost [...]

To a good many marketing people, focus groups have become identified with qualitative research. When they say, “We’ll do some qual”, they mean they’ll do some focus groups. They expect these focus groups to tell them something. Most often the focus groups tell them nothing very useful.
Focus groups, at their inception, were never intended to [...]

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