Nobody pays me to write any of the copy on my blog, and should I ever have the good fortune that they do, I will declare it. My main employment is as the owner and principal of The Future Place consultancy. The Future Place provides two key services 1) training and services to industry and academic bodies and 2) consultancy services to companies. The details of the companies I work with are a private matter, but if I blog about any company who has paid The Future Place more than expenses recently (approx. two years) I will mention that they are a client. I hold equity in Virtual Surveys and provide consulting services to them from time to time.
I am paid to run courses for a number of trade bodies and over the last few years clients have included ESOMAR, AMSRS, MRS, and MRIA.
The plans are beginning to come together for an all online virtual conference to be held in December, possibly December 8th (any thoughts, suggestions, problems with this date?) We expect to be appointing the Advisory Board over the next week and to be inviting contributions shortly.
There is a strong feeling that there should be a democratic element in the selection of papers for the ‘main stage’ allowing potential viewers to sign-up and vote on speakers. There is likely to be a charge for attending the conference, but it is likely that the charge will be modest.
Not all well remembered and liked ads are effective. This lesson was illustrated in 1959 when UK tobacco company Wills launched the Strand cigarette. The cigarette was launched by a major television advertising campaign along with posters, newspapers, and coupons for free packs of Strand cigarettes.
The TV campaign featured a man walking in a wet London street, wearing a rain coat, smoking a cigarette in a reflective manner, with the theme being “You’re never alone with a Strand”. The ads were widely talked about, much liked, included a memorable tune, and were parodied by leading UK comedian Tony Hancock. The actor playing the man in the ad became a celebrity and the theme tune entered the music charts.
However, the cigarette bombed and was soon removed from the market. It seemed the public associated the brand Strand with losers. People liked the ad but did not want to be personally associated with somebody whose only friend was a cigarette.
This campaign reminds researchers that issues such as standout and memorability are not enough. A bad campaign can finish a brand - especially a memorable bad campaign!
Following an idea that has been discussed in the NewMR group on LinkedIn The Future Place is going to organise a virtual conference later in the year, around the theme of “What will be the key NewMR themes in 2011 and 2012”.
The definition of what we mean by a virtual conference is still being refined, but it is likely to include the following:
A core channel based on something like GoToWebinar which will host conventional presentations
A Twitter backchannel to facilitate discussion and links to ‘Fringe’ events
On open space
Chat facilities
A sponsored stream for corporate presentations
Global, in the sense that it will start about midday in New Zealand and finish about 4pm US West Coast time, allowing people to access some of the event regardless of their time-zone
A screened selection of presentations
A 'turn up and present' facility
One of the models that is being used for the virtual conference is the Edinburgh Festival, with its core programme and then its lively Fringe of impromptu and less structured events.
Several people have already offered to help organise and promote the event and an Advisory Board will be created shortly, let us know if you would like to be considered for the Advisory Board.
Two possible dates are being explored at the moment, the 12th November and 17th December, both Fridays. Any thoughts and preferences between the two would be appreciated.
I have decided to try an experiment with The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research and I am going to try selling two copies via eBay. I am very happy with its ranking on Amazon.co.uk, but a little disappointed that Amazon.com won’t be shipping until October.
So, I have posted two copies for sale via auction, one an unsigned copy and one a signed copy. They have both started at £4.99 which represents a great bargain compared with buying it online where the price is about £27 (the price in a book shop is £39.99). So, if you want to secure a cheap copy it is probably worth a bid whilst prices remain low.
I have listed one signed and one unsigned copy to see what the price difference is (will my ego stand it if the signed copy goes for less, or does not sell at all?)
I am in the final stages of pulling together two workshops on presenting with Fred John from MasterCard, both of which will be run in Athens as part of the ESOMAR Congress. The first is The Power of Storytelling and Narrative and the second is Presenting: The Latest Tools and Techniques for Creating Compelling Presentations. Both of these presentations will use PowerPoint as the underlying method of organising and presenting material on the screen, because it is simply the best tool currently available (unless you are using a Mac when Keynote achieves pretty much the same thing).
There seems to be a trend to attack PowerPoint at the moment as being the source of the problem of bad presentations. But I am convinced that the problem rests mostly in the hands of the presenters. It is true that PowerPoint’s default layout and ready supply of bullets makes a boring presentation very easy to create, but that is like blaming bad driving on the car rather than the driver, or like saying paint should not be used for art because it is used for fences and doors.
Why do I use PowerPoint?
There are a large number of reasons I use it, but the following are probably the key ones:
It is widely available. I can email people a PowerPoint presentation with a reasonable expectation that it will run on their machine, without them needing to access the Internet or download anything. I prefer to present from my laptop, but frequently this is not an option, for example at most conferences or in secure locations. Some care needs to be taken over fonts, versions of PowerPoint (which mostly means 97-2003 versus the latest format at the moment), and of course video and audio files.
PowerPoint’s slide sorter view is a great way of organising slides. If I use Excel, Word, HTML, Publisher or any similar type of document, moving and re-ordering slides is slow, in PowerPoint it is easy.
Builds make it easy to create meaningful presentations without having to use multiple slides or images. In particular animating charts, by category, by series, or by individual element is a really robust way of creating a narrative to a chart.
PowerPoint is very good at re-sizing images without distorting them. I think it compares well with specialist products such as PaintShopPro.
The print options of Handouts, Slides, and Notes are very convenient – but none of them create a good leave behind.
The ability to control templates, fonts, backgrounds etc is very useful to create standardised and attractive presentations.
If I need to automate tasks, then VBA is a very powerful tool to achieve this, especially if integrated with Excel.
One of the key points, in my opinion, is that PowerPoint does not push people into using bullets. When you make a new slide you will typically choose a layout and you will see (depending on how you have configured PowerPoint) the options below.
None of these options is a bullet list. Four of the nine options have a content container. A content container – such as the one below, has seven options.
The seven options in a content container are
I. Click to add text, this is the bullet option.
II. A table, the top left icon
III. A chart
IV. A SmartArt graphic – great for beginners to produce diagrams and with a range of built-in build options
V. A picture
VI. Clip art
VII. A movie file
So, each time a new slide is made the user is faced with 12 options, one of them is a bulleted list. If that user finds most of their slides are bulleted lists, should they really be criticising PowerPoint, or looking closer to home?
I find that most of the slides I use one of the two formats highlighted below
That is, most of my formats are a heading and nothing else or a blank slide. But even when I am using blank formats, PowerPoint is my choice of presentation software, because of the reasons I listed above.
Are there things that annoy me with PowerPoint or that I wish were better? Yes, absolutely! Key improvements I would like to see are:
More audio and video formats. PowerPoint is almost flawless with wmv files, but anything beyond that is risky.
I would like it to have more dynamic options, borrowing some ideas from Prezi.
I would like a better way to create leave behind documents (PowerPoint usually sucks as a leave behind)
A better and more powerful option than Chart (and less buggy)
Don’t use presentation software for non-presentation uses!
My final rant is that one of the problems is that people are using PowerPoint for things that are not presentations, and it is bad at most of those. Do not use PowerPoint as a vehicle for a brief or a quote, do not use it as a repository of information to be searched at a later date, do not use it as a method of exploring data or information, do not (normally) use it as a leave behind. It does not do any of those things well.
A presentation, in most cases, is where the presenter has something to say and the slides (including videos, flipcharts, audio etc) are simply there to let them tell their story. A presentation is a guided exercise (generally) where the presenter has done the work up front to discover the narrative theme and the slides help tell that story. If the session is not that sort of session, for example if you are working as a group to explore the meaning of some information, then use an alternative tool. For example, have the data in Excel, use prepared pages, but be ready to drill down to the data and prepare alternative views.
Or, more entertainingly
The video clip below shows a similar point being made in a humorous was by Don McMillan.
The book seems to be off to a flying start, well at least it is in terms of sales from www.Amazon.co.uk who have started shipping copies to customers. It looks at that Amazon.com will only be shipping from about October 13th. One of the things I like about the Amazon sites is the 'Look Inside' feature which allows you read some of the book online before buying it.
What makes me think it off to a flying start? Well, it is too early to get numbers back from the publisher yet, but Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk both publish book rankings, which are updated hourly.
On 19th August the book was ranked, for a time, as being number 1 in its genre by Amazon.co.uk, and at number 2 in the whole Sales and Marketing category. Note both of these links are dynamic and you may have to scroll to find the book if it has dropped. By contrast, Amazon.com had it ranked at number 33 in Research, but that was with a 6 week delay in delivery.
Now that the book is beginning to get in the hands of readers I am beginning to prepare a website to complement. HOSMR.com will seek to keep the material up to date. The idea behind the website is that it will serve two key purposes, one to be a resource for people interested in online and social media research. The second will be to prepare the ground for an updated book in the future or for parallel projects. Given the success of the collaborative approach adopted for this book, I plan the next stage to build on and expand the collaborative elements.
Survivor bias is a theoretical sounding name for a concept that occurs frequently and can be the cause of major errors in evaluating phenomena. Survivor bias occurs when we look at a group of people who are special in some way to try to see what made them special. There is a risk that we identify a characteristic and assume that it is a determining characteristic.
For example, in the late 1970s Tom Peters researched 43 successful companies to determine what made them successful, work which ended up being published in his book In Search of Excellence. However, by early 1984 a third of these companies were in trouble, throwing doubt on Peters’ recommendations. Perhaps this accounts for why his advice in Thriving on Chaos seemed quite different in 1987?
One marketing trap, that relates to survivor bias, is the way some companies, especially multi-level marketers, show examples of ordinary people who have become rich selling their products (e.g. through party plans, door-to-door etc). By faithfully re-telling individual case studies, so many hours per week, so many meetings/parties/doors etc they can create the impression that anybody can do it, when the facts are that nearly everybody fails.
A great example of survivor bias comes from the story of the King’s coin man. The story starts with two neighbouring kingdoms, Upend and Downend. At Christmas each year the kings get together for a party and they decide who is going to pay by tossing a golden coin. For four years in a row the king from Upend wins, causing the king from Downend to suspect that he is less good at tossing a coin than his neighbour. So, the king decides next year that he will take one of his subjects with him to toss the coin and he will find out the best coin man in his kingdom. He announces a competition for the best coin man, with every contestant having to pay one groat to enter the competition. At first 1024 of his subjects enter the competition. They are split into pairs and play the first round, after the first round there are 512 left. They keep playing until just 2 are left, each having won 9 times in a row! The press interview each of the finalists, who both explain what they have for breakfast, how they hold the coin, what makes them decide heads or tails. Then they have the final, and the winner is triumphant, he has won ten competitions in a row, what were the odds against that? (about 1024-to-1 of course). The assumption that the winner is any more likely to win at Christmas is survivor bias.
The impact of survivor bias on market research can be profound. If we conduct focus groups with people who dissatisfied with a product, we might find they have several characteristics in common, but we do not know that we are not suffering from survivor bias, what if happy customers share some of the same characteristics?
One way to get higher scores from a concept test is to make the questionnaire longer and put the purchase question near the end. There tends to be a bias in the way people drop out, with the least interested dropping out more than the happy people, so the result at the end seems higher.
If a utility provides a service that is great for some people and rotten for others, then over the years they may find the people receiving the rotten service leaving. This could result in their annual customer satisfaction scores increasing, because of survivor bias, i.e. the people who are left are the ones who were receiving the more appropriate service.
The general point for market researchers is that it is not enough to see that a group shares something in common, the people who are not in the group need to be examined to see that they do not also share the characteristic.
Formalised research ethics have not always been with us. At one time it was felt that ethical considerations could be left to experts and religions, without the need for regulation and legislation. Over the last hundred years this trust has all too often been shown to be misplaced, and high profile cases have shaped the research landscape we have today. This TARSK (things all researchers should know) covers one well known example.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment ran from 1932 to 1972 in Tuskagee, Alabama, USA. The research started by recruiting 339 poor African-American men who had syphilis in 1932 (at a time when there was not any effective treatment) and followed their progress over the next forty years to see how the disease developed if left untreated.
At the time the project started, in 1932, there is reason to believe that its aims were positive. For example, it seems the experiment was intended to highlight the need for treatment programmes.
However, the shortcomings were numerous and appalling:
1. The 339 men recruited were not told they had syphilis and consequently went on to infect many of their wives, which resulted in 19 of their children being born with congenital syphilis.
2. By 1947 penicillin had become the standard and effective treatment for syphilis, however many of the men were not treated, nor told of their disease and the options to end it.
3. Some of the men who were aware of penicillin were given placebos to enable their progress to be recorded.
4. After the Second World War, and the medical abuses associated with the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Code was adopted to protect research subjects, but nobody involved with this experiment or overseeing it (for example the CDC) seems to have made the connection that these new rules covered them.
Although the experiment was never ‘secret’, for example, plenty of papers were published, the public in general were not aware of it. The story was eventually leaked to the press by Peter Buxton, who had spent several years trying to get the programme closed down through the official channels (for example, in 1966 the Government’s CDC confirmed the need to continue the study until all the men were dead and had been autopsied). The story was carried by the Washington Start in July 1972 and the experiment was closed the same year.
In 1976 the historian James Jones interviewed John Heller, who had been the Director of the Venereal Disease unit of the PHS from 1943 to 1948, amongst Heller’s remarks were “The men's status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.”
In 1974 the US Government passed the National Research Act and the creation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research helping ensure that such things could not happen in the future.
Research conducted in 1990 by Southern Christian Leadership Conference among African American churchgoers found that 34% thought AIDS was an artificial virus, 35% thought it a form of genocide, and 44% thought the Government were not telling the truth about AIDS. Many commentators have linked these beliefs to the loss of confidence created by the Tuskegee experiment.
Over the years I have used Sawtooth Software’s products on a large number of occasions, but almost always for advanced projects, for example to use their ACA product and their Hierachical Bayes modules.
But I have just finished a project using CiW for a straightforward online survey and was delighted with it.
Over the years, one of the strengths of the Sawtooth Software has been its robust performance and the power it gives the scripter in writing surveys. This helped ensure that on this occasion the survey was very straightforward to write, including the variant of MaxDiff we used in the survey (without resorting to MaxDiff specific software). Other positives included a really well written user manual, helpful (and free) support and the ability to script and test the questionnaire offline.
The main limitations of the software are that it does not include panel management and does not include the latest Flash and interactive styles of questions as built-in options (you can add them manually with the free format question). For some users, the need to install the software on a server would be a major limitation, but this can be a plus if you need to host a survey in a specific country (as we did for this study), compared with an ASP type solution, and similarly the need to be responsible for the reliability of the server will put some less technical people off (although Sawtooth do offer a hosting service).
However, because of their pricing model (you buy the software rather pay per interview) and the relatively modest price, Sawtooth’s CiW offers the savvy researcher chance to operate with very low cost per interview. I can certainly see myself using Sawtooth software again for straightforward jobs, rather than just using them for the advanced projects.
The traditional version of this story is that in the late 1970s Sony dominated the video market and expected their high quality Betamax product to keep any competitors at bay. However, VHS, an inferior standard, entered the market with some marketing advantages and secured some 70% of the US market within a few years, leading to the death of Betamax as a popular, home format.
The moral being that the best product does not always win (the Apple Mac and the PC are often cited as another example of the same phenomenon).
The more detailed picture is that Betamax was released in 1975, based on the professional U-matic standard. Betamax was soon offered by most of the leading brands of home video players (but home video was pretty small at the time).
VHS was launched by JVC in 1977, because they did not want to help Sony gain a strangle hold on the market, in the way it had for the professional market with U-matic.
Initially Betamax had several advantages over VHS, more companies were using it, the picture quality was better, the tapes were smaller (which meant the machines could be smaller). However, VHS tapes allowed longer recording times - although this was not seen by the 'experts' as a key benefit at the time.
VHS came more into its own with the demand for a camcorder that could be used to play a video back and to use the same video (without translation) on a VCR (a player/recorder that tended to be bigger than the TV in many cases). The Betamax version required the tape from the Betamax camera to be converted before it could be played on a Betamax VCR.
By 1980 JVC’s VHS had gained 70% of the US market, at a time the market was growing strongly. This market advantage allowed it to sell its products in Europe at lower prices, because of economies of scale. In the UK Betamax had a 25% share in 1981 but this fell to 7.5% in 1986. In 1988 even Sony had to start making VHS machines.
The following is a direct quote from Wikipedia (13 August 2010) as it illustrates the way that enthusiasts can be so different from the masses:
“Many of these people maintain (on technical merits, not related to run time or availability of prerecorded titles, but more akin to professional video concerns) that Betamax is superior to VHS in many ways, including picture quality, tape wear, and system design and convenience of use. For many of these people, VHS never rendered Betamax obsolete, and DVD may not either; the discrepancy between their view and the mainstream arises from a difference in the criteria (i.e., the interests) on which they judge. Also, some appreciate Betamax decks as examples of superior engineering or innovation for the time—Sony's Betamax was first with many features, such as hi-fi sound, full threading on load (which allows faster transitions between stop, play, and fast winding tape transport modes), and digital freeze frame (never available on a large number of VHS recorder models), which VHS adopted later. Because of their high build quality, many Sony Betamax machines are still working well today, and high-featured models sell regularly for hundreds of dollars on eBay and elsewhere.”
One warning for market researchers is that in this case listening to the early adopters and the technically minded would probably have resulted in believing that Betamax would win out. The problem was that the people who knew about the field were not typical of the people who did not know they were going to be the future customers.
