Getting hold of national debt figures is often difficult. Few countries publish them. But for the G7 countries, that do, an interesting picture emerges (see Figure 1). Figure 1: National net debt as a % of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Italy has had large national debt for decades and Japan’s has increased over the last ten years, almost reaching the scale of Italy’s. Every country, however, has registered an increase in national debt as a percentage of GDP since the credit crunch materialised in 2007. The rate at which these countries’ national debt as a percentage of GDP has grown…
Qualitative Research
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FreshMinds Research
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On borrowed time: should we worry about national debt?
5 Feb 2010 | 7:03 am -
Branding in the Education Sector
1 Feb 2010 | 2:04 amEven today, parts of the Education world regard branding with great suspicion, a symbol of commercialism, a waste of resources, and an encouragement of competition, something which has no place alongside research, teaching and training. Years ago, when I used to run a youth club, I knew I wasn’t running a business – the outcomes sought were human, not financial, for a start. Nonetheless, I used to make a critical distinction between a business and behaving in a businesslike manner – I never saw any virtue in having no members, or no money! The analogy is not really far fetched –… -
Productivity bites: Apple versus snow
28 Jan 2010 | 1:26 amThe recent snow has, apparently, hit the UK economy to the tune of £1.35bn. That’s a lot of money and makes you wonder quite how much grit we could buy with it. Recently I spent six hours travelling to Oxford for a meeting that was abandoned because of snow at the last minute. In theory that’s six hours of lost time during which I could have been working. Luckily for me (and for FreshMinds) this is no longer wasted time. Now I have my iPhone. This meant that I could field emails, read the news, anticipate the length of delay of my train, call clients and generally make the best of a… -
Social suicide?
22 Jan 2010 | 7:14 amI can’t imagine life without Facebook. I use it to stay in touch with friends, organise my events, keep track of endless invites to birthdays, parties, launches etc. It helps, right? Well, not necessarily. Recently, I’ve been trying to keep track of how much time I spend on Facebook and the stats were quite sobering! It turns out, some days I spend as much as one whole hour of my evening using social media. This is time I could be spending taking a walk or having coffee with a friend offline. (I still find it weird this is an actual word. I always thought that you either meet up with… -
Life after death (part 2)
19 Jan 2010 | 12:58 amWe have had a debate in the office recently about the role of research agencies in the ‘behaviour change’ agenda, considering why traditional research companies seem to have been hesitant to embrace this zeitgeist. There can be a degree of confusion over what topics and ideas are covered by this behaviour change concept. For some, it covers only the field of behavioural economics, popularised by books like ‘Nudge’, and ‘Predictably Irrational’, which identifies ways to understand and transform behaviour through reference to the quirks, rules-of-thumb and limitations of our…
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Zebra Bites
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Bang bang
18 Jan 2010 | 7:53 pmDo you agree or disagree with the following statement…? Data quality is critically compromised when double-barreled questions/statements are used in market research surveys and researchers who write them into their surveys should be shot. ;P Posted in market research -
Seeing the bigger picture
21 Nov 2009 | 1:55 amWhat has Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus got to do with market research? Well, note the crop. But as nice as it is, it’s only the bigger picture that tells us the actual story. This is at the heart of the next issue for discussion; the ‘new’ (?!) practice of listening online. Of course ‘listening’ itself, as a method of research inquiry, is pretty obvious and hardly new. What is new* for market research however, is; the online location per se, some of the online listening technologies, and in some cases, the actual content generated online. But new or not, you still need… -
It’s a fine line
16 Nov 2009 | 4:19 pmThere’s been a lot of talk about engaging research participants in this ‘new’ research paradigm. I’m focusing on qualitative market research here because firstly, that’s my thing… …and secondly, because I hear that ‘engagement’, within the context of market research online communities, is community-nirvana. The ‘best’ communities are engaged communities. This strikes me as, paradoxically, both obvious and alarming. There’s a very fine line between engaging research participants enough to… well…participate in our market research, and over engaging… -
The ‘new’ world of market research
2 Nov 2009 | 2:58 pmI’ve just come back from a fantastic trip to Chicago where I attended the ESOMAR Online Research 2009 conference. You can find Jeffrey Henning’s brilliant recap here (he pretty much live-blogged it – very impressive!). Anyway, not surprisingly, there was lots of talk of ‘new’. And it would have been easy to come away with the message that the market research industry really needs to get with the ‘new’ programme or, quite simply, it will wither away and die. Because the new world of research is here! New methodologies. New technologies. New ways of engaging with respondents… -
‘Traditional’ vs what? ‘Unestablished’ research?
17 Oct 2009 | 2:18 amThe term ‘traditional research’ is often used to describe offline methodologies; mostly, I’ve observed, in the context of selling what I assume must be ‘non-traditional’ (??) online methodologies. In this context, the word ‘traditional’ conjures imagery of antiquated, moth-eaten and fusty research practices. And clearly, many offline methodologies are anything but. Not to mention that many research solutions require a hybrid of both online and offline approaches. But if we have to throw labels around, it’d probably be more accurate to substitute the word…
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Conversations with Dina
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Bytes for Feb 3
3 Feb 2010 | 8:30 amDaily updates on what I’m reading Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential Spreaders in Social Networks – CLIPS: "…. the importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. "In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people," they say. At first glance this seems somewhat counter intuitive but on reflection it makes perfect sense. Kitsak and co point out that there are various scenarios in which well connected hubs have little… -
Bytes for Jan 29
29 Jan 2010 | 8:30 amDaily updates on what I’m reading Calling non-USA based women activists – CLIP: "Today I'm proud to announce the BlogHer 2010 International Activist Scholarship Program. Here's how it works: If you or someone you know is a woman blogger, outside the United States, blogging to raise awareness, consciousness or funding to change their community, region, country or the world, then please nominate yourself or such a blogger to win one of these four scholarships. Scholarship Winners Will Receive: * A full 2-day conference pass to BlogHer '10 * Round trip airfare to and… -
Reliance Netconnect Broadband on Macbook with Snow Leopard
28 Jan 2010 | 5:07 amFinal hiccups solved! Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I’ve been struggling to get my netconnect broadband modem to work as well as it previously did. I’ve blogged about my initial hiccups, where I thought I’d found a great solution. Well it worked, but my speeds have been abysmal. Called Reliance service guys – they couldn’t find a fix – and asked me to locate a driver at the Apple India – and there was none of course. It’s been a few months now – small mercies that this is just my travel mate, and not my main connection. I… -
Bytes for Jan 27
27 Jan 2010 | 8:30 amDaily updates on what I’m reading A New Mobile Radar concept from Nokia Research Centre | via @tsuvik – Make sure you check out the video too! CLIP: "Nokia Research Center (NRC) Helsinki today unveiled a new research concept at “Demo House 2010″ research exhibition in Espoo, Finland. The mobile radar demonstration shows how a mobile device can use an active radar sensor to measure speed, its distance and the direction of movement of approaching objects, similiar to the traditional RADAR. It uses electromagnetic waves to provide a different type of mobile wireless… -
Bytes for Jan 25
25 Jan 2010 | 8:30 amDaily updates on what I’m reading Mattel takes innovation to the dogs with its Puppy Tweets – CLIP: "Puppy Tweets is a plastic tag with a sound and motion sensor that you attach to your pet's dog collar and connect its USB receiver to your computer. Then you create a Twitter account for your dog and enjoy updates all day from Sparky or whatever its name is on your computer or smartphone. The tag is set with several pre-recorded tweets that are triggered by the dog's activities. So if he's running around, you might get a tweet that says "I finally caught that…
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Cheskin - Fresh Perspectives
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AOL Hispanic Cyberstudy 2010
1 Feb 2010 | 12:16 pmWith the launch of the AOL Hispanic Cyberstudy this week, we are reminded of several important ideas that relate to serving ethnic consumers. One of these is the persistent belief in old notions regarding the Hispanic market. These worn assumptions are not only no longer valid, but the fact that many marketers still tout them is undermining numerous growth opportunities for companies. Let's take a look at just three of these... -
Eclipsing CSR
27 Jan 2010 | 11:00 pmLast week Royal Caribbean cruise lines made the decision to continue the journey of the Celebrity Solstice through the beach town of Labadee, Haiti with all 200 passengers on board. The fact that the beach town is just 60 miles from the destroyed capital of Port-au-Prince where global rescue teams were scrambling to bring relief and aid to those hundreds of thousands that did not lay dead under the rubble, seemed to make no difference to those either on the ship or those making the decision. -
Open Source Social Innovation
26 Jan 2010 | 9:31 amLast week Bill Gates entered the digital publishing world by establishing the Gates Notes - an online evolution of his now annual January letter sharing his thoughts and learnings on the progress of the issues central to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s interesting and symbolic that the next chapter of his life story would include an “open source” platform for sharing IP on social innovation. -
The Effect of Consumer Choice on the Mobile Internet
24 Jan 2010 | 3:26 pmGoogle's Android operating system generated 27 percent of mobile ad requests from U.S. smartphones in Q4, according to mobile advertising network AdMob's Mobile Metrics Report for December 2009. Apple's iPhone yielded 54 percent of U.S. smartphone requests in the previous quarter. One of my co-workers at Cheskin Added Value said, “Thinking about Google’s biz strategy, it makes sense to put out phones not for the sake of selling hardware or truly innovating in the mobile OS space, but for the sake of generating more traffic to their search engine, the cash cow.” -
Redefining the flying experience
20 Jan 2010 | 12:45 pmVirgin America has succeeded in redefining the flying experience for me. This is no mean feat, as airlines have to work within many constraints like FAA regulations, safety considerations, and limited space. But constraints can actually spark creativity, and Virgin has managed to be creative in just the right ways for me. Why am I such a fan of Virgin America?
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The Human Element
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Are you ready to deal with enragement as well as engagement?
8 Feb 2010 | 5:05 amA quick follow-on from Friday’s post on climate science and the need to engage the public. Science’s vision of ‘the public’ is typically a bunch of respectful yet unfortunately undereducated folk. In reality, there are many publics, including the respectful and the occasionally hostile. Yesterday’s Sunday Times carried an interview with Professor Phil Jones, the head of UEA’s climate science unit, and as such at the centre of the furore over leaked emails from the unit that appear to suggest scientists suppressing Freedom of Information… -
Climate science and the need for engagement
5 Feb 2010 | 3:51 am(I don’t talk much here about my science communication research, but here are some personal observations on climate change reporting. I worked for an organisation involved in crop science back in the late 90s, so I saw that particular debate from very close up.) Climate science reporting is increasingly beginning to resemble the debates on MMR vaccine and genetically modified crops – in other words, any rational discussion of the underlying science becomes totally sunk beneath polarised media coverage and divergent political standpoints. The furore over leaked emails from the… -
Show and tell: finding lovely communities
3 Feb 2010 | 4:21 amAfter Christmas, I got a bit weighed down by the Twitter-created business blogosphere – often wonderful but increasingly like a giant webring where you know you will eventually come back to Seth Godin. This web-fatigue is part of the cycle, I think, because I see it in other online settings. My overwhelm got to the point where I couldn’t summon up the will to comment. I don’t like that. So I stopped reading-for-work, and just played around for a bit; and in so doing I found blogs, message boards and websites which are still entirely packed with comments. It’s… -
The Dark Art of the Telephone Depth Interview
14 Jan 2010 | 6:45 amOld telephone by macinate, on Flickr People aren’t very keen on telephone interviews. The phone interview tends to be seen as the (deeply) impoverished relation of the face-to-face interview. There are plenty of obvious negatives: on the phone, you have no eye contact, no body language, and precious little context. It’s true that the lack of visual information is a distinct drawback. There are advantages, though. Personally, I love telephone interviews. They can be direct, freeing, and incredibly stimulating to conduct. People have told me things on the phone… -
Wisdom of Mobs: the feedback loop
29 Dec 2009 | 2:50 amIt’s that eerily calm pause between Christmas and New Year frenzy. There’s a number of half-formed posts in my head, but we’ll go with a swirling scarcely-formed one about crowds, audiences and mobs. Desirable audiences and undesirable ones. Thought one: the way that the internet has caused unknown mass audiences to become active participants. I’m thinking of the people who complained to the Press Complaints Commission about Jan Moir’s piece on Stephen Gately; and on a lighter note, the people persuaded to download Rage Against the Machine in preference to…
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Co-creating the future
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Stolen from the greatest HR policy PowerPoint ever made
9 Feb 2010 | 9:16 amAny company should by now have learnt that its customers can talk about them, to massive effect, without their permission. (As the HuffPo says here, it is kind of a leap of logic to think that United Breaks Guitars lost the company 10% of its market capitalisation, but it certainly wasn’t good for them.) But today we can also pretty effectively organise without their permission. We can use functionality like Facebook groups to mobilise many people quickly. So far the manifestation of this has mostly been in the form of ‘stop energy’; most efforts have essentially threatened… -
Etihad leading the way
21 Jan 2010 | 9:41 amA belated Happy New year from the Promise Blog! We have had an extremely hectic start to the year, with a group from Promise spending most of last week in Sydney, working on a co-creation project for Etihad, the national carrier for the UAE. Etihad are a fantastic organisation and great for us to work with. The airline is only six years old but already has a fleet of over 50 aircraft, a powerful global brand and this year was awarded ‘The world’s leading airline’ by the World Travel Awards. The organisation uses co-creation to help drive innovation in new products and services, and… -
On the way in 2010…
23 Dec 2009 | 7:48 amWe’re going to be going a bit quiet on the Promise Blog for a week or so. Everyone is taking a break from co-creating for a couple of days. My experience is that the co-creation philosophy doesn’t work so well in a busy kitchen on Christmas morning. Dictatorship is the accepted wisdom in this particualr scenario. We will of course be keeping our eye’s open for anything that interests us, and we think would interest you, over the holidays and we will resume blogging in earnest in the New Year. In fact, we already have a bit of a plan for January, so here are a couple of… -
Study on changing consumer attitudes going into 2010
18 Dec 2009 | 5:46 amLast week we ran two workshops with consumers exploring the question – ‘What has changed for you in 2009?’ We are currently producing a report on changing consumer attitudes in 2009 and how these will affect behaviours in 2010. This document will be available at the beginning of next year and will be designed to give marketers an insight into a changed consumer mindset going into 2010. However, being something of a report writing maverick, I have decided to give Blog readers a sneak peak at the key ideas that we will be exploring and tell you a little bit about our process. The thinking… -
Cowell & Co-Creation
15 Dec 2009 | 10:53 amX-Factor has undeniably revolutionised the way in which the music industry interacts with consumers. The now ubiquitous televised voting format has created the kind of star with whom it seems consumers share some affinity. Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke in particular garner support not just because of their incredible talent, but because without such voices, they’re nothing exceptional in themselves; they’re normal, just like you. Both are quintessentially girls next door, made good. Not only is there an emotive bond between star and consumer, with televised talent shows, the consumer is…
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UIE Brain Sparks
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Ad Hoc Personas
8 Feb 2010 | 11:04 amTreat your team to a conference-quality seminar right from your own office. Join us for the next UIE Virtual Seminar, The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization On the Same Page, with Tamara Adlin, Thursday, February 18. When you kick off a project right, everything is much easier. When that doesn’t happen, the team pays the price. We’ve all seen projects where, part way in, a well-intentioned executive derailed the team by changing the direction. To prevent this, we want to put everyone with the power to take the project off course, on to the… -
SpoolCast: Leveraging Search Patterns & Discovery with Peter Morville
5 Feb 2010 | 10:11 amDuration: 36m | 21 MB Recorded: January, 2010 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] Peter Morville is the co-presenter of one of our most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of all time, Leverage Search and Discovery Patterns. As is often the case, our audience came up with a heap of thoughtful questions, which we decided to break up into two podcasts. This is the first, and the second will feature Peter’s co-presenter Mark Burrell answering even more of your… -
UIEtips: Part 1 – The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign
5 Feb 2010 | 8:30 amIt’s hard to have a conversation about great design without mentioning Apple. Usually, we’re talking about the design of the iPod, iPhone, or last week’s newly announced iPad. However, those aren’t the only interesting challenges Apple’s talented designers have tackled. They’ve done an amazing job with something that wouldn’t get a lot of attention otherwise: the web site checkout forms. In this issue of UIEtips, Luke Wroblewski dissects the newly redesigned Apple.com checkout process. As always, his critique is brilliant, providing a ton of great… -
SpoolCast: Escaping Navigation Hell with Hagan Rivers
1 Feb 2010 | 2:20 pmDuration: 25m | 14 MB Recorded: January, 2010 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] Hagan Rivers We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. When we were talking with her late last year, she mentioned she had another innovation in her web app design workflow, which sounded a bit strange at first blush: she designs the navigation as a separate… -
SpoolCast: Stephen Anderson on Seductive Interactions
28 Jan 2010 | 1:32 pmDuration: 36m | 20MB Recorded: January, 2010 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] How can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want? One of the bleeding edge ideas we’ll be talking about at the UIE Web App Masters Tour is adding motivation to web applications. How do you encourage user behavior through the design of your web app? It may initially sound a bit far-fetched, but there’s an industry that’s been shaping its…
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Martin Lindstrom
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Brand vision - Absolut Branded Language
Disney, Kellogg's, and Gillette are three completely different brands with one commonality. Over the past decade, they've established a branded language, whether they know it or not. In my latest book, we found 74 percent of today's consumers associate the word "crunch" with Kellogg's. Another 59 percent consider the word "masculine" and Gillette as one and the same. Americans formed the strongest association of masculinity to Gillette, by an astounding 84 percent. Disney scored higher in purloined language than any other brand. This brand welcomes you to its kingdom of fantasy, dreams,… -
Wireless strategy - Useful techniques - B2Branding
Let's discuss a product category that's excruciatingly boring: rolling bearings and seals. I want to look at SKF, one of the world's largest manufacturers of rolling bearings and seals. I don't know about you, but I couldn't think of a less sexy and uninspiring product line. If you didn't know this business or the brand, you'd think (when you visited SKF's site) you'd arrived at the wrong URL. SKF not only tells you about the company's support of one of the world's largest rock shows and how SKF products help their clients make delicious biscuits, it also has a special postcard section. The… -
Wireless strategy - Product placement - Useful techniques - Future generations - BRANDchild
You may be surprised to learn that close to 80 per cent of all brands purchased by parents is controlled by their offspring. But what will undoubtedly startle you are the figures that show a whopping 67 per cent of all car purchases is also determined by the children of the home – and not by the parents. Tweens (8- 14 year olds) are an increasingly powerful and smart consumer group, which in 2002 alone, spent and influenced an astounding €1.88 trillion. Did you know that an average British kid between 8 and 13 years of age is exposed to 22,000 television commercials a year? In fact these… -
Brand vision - Blogs
You can’t avoid them – the blogs. They’re so plentiful that the opinions they offer are forming part of news reports. Given the evident potency of blogs, therefore, the question is should blogs remain within their current sphere of influence, helping individuals to share their personal opinions on with the world, or should they be adopted by brands as communication tools? The fact is that the marriage between blogs and brands is no longer a vision. Personality brands, like Seth Godin or Tom Peters, already blog the net. And brands like Weight watchers, LEGO, Apple or Harley Davidson… -
Optimizing sales - Brand alliances - Brand Alliances Put to the Test
I'll bet that, more than once in your career, you've pondered the risk of teaming up with some other brand in a co-branding deal. The deal probably looked good; the conditions were perfect; but the brand... would it damage your own? It would be an exaggeration to claim that a number of studies have examined co-branding. But, luckily enough, I've managed to get hold of one study that might help us shed light on the issue. The Journal of Consumer Marketing published the study I’m referring to in 2000. It reveals a lot of interesting data and highlights facts of which we are possibly…
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PluggedIN
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Dunbar's number in market research online communities
9 Feb 2010 | 12:39 amI recently read an article on CNET (Sorry, Facebook friends: Our brains can't keep up) about Dunbar's number playing out the same way online as it does offline. I've blogged a bit about this in the context of other topics, but thought it would be worth mentioning again as it seems to come up quite a bit in the debate on proper MROC sizes. For those not familiar with Dunbar's number, it's basically a mental limit to the number of "relationships" that one can maintain at any given time. The term "relationships" here is a bit fuzzy for some people, but generally means that you… -
Getting rid of "respondent" from the market research industry lexicon
26 Jan 2010 | 7:17 amRespondent.Think about that word for a second. Many of us in the market research industry use it day in and day out, yet we probably don't pause and think of the connotations. A quick search comes up with the following definition (courtesy of the Market Research Glossary of Terms):"Respondent - This is the individual that provides data to be collected during the research process. Also referred to as a unit, unit of analysis, participant, experimental unit, or subject." To me, a "respondent" is someone who is merely asked a series of questions in a 20 minute survey and kicked to… -
Screening for the best MROC participants
20 Jan 2010 | 5:40 amWhen first launching your research community, you typically need to build a screener (preferably) online that ensures that you find the right type of respondents for your research community. In addition to basic qualification and demographic criteria, we also recommend that you include question types that help you find people that: Use of social media in their daily life (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)Are more prone to actually creating content in these social media environments Are generally more extroverted and comfortable connecting with othersAre a bit more creative and open-mindedAre… -
Social media for market research? The jury is still out...
19 Jan 2010 | 9:24 amI caught an article the other day on Social Media Today (direct link here) on how companies are largely undecided on the value of social media when it comes to understanding their customers (which I'll conveniently put under the umbrella of "market research" for the purposes of this post). According to the article, almost two-thirds (63%) of the people who responded to the survey said they are "undecided" about the value of data collected from social media sites to help them understand more about their organization or customers. This doesn't come as much of a surprise to me, and here's… -
Market Research in a Web 2.0 world
14 Jan 2010 | 3:31 amI randomly came across this image the other day on Digg.com (sorry, I have no idea who the author is otherwise I'd give credit where credit is due). While at first I laughed, I had to pause and wonder... Is Web 2.0 the "dumbed down" version of how the web started out? If so, is that a good thing (i.e., "dumbed down" means "simple," "accessible" and inherently "social")? Or is this a bad thing (i.e., shorter attention spans, shallow connections, less knowledge sharing, etc...)? Further, what does this mean for those of us in market research? Coming from the…
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The QuestionPro Blog
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Excellent Articles and Thoughts on Customer Feedbackue
8 Feb 2010 | 11:24 amThere has been a lot going on in terms of customer feedback lately. Today, I thought I would share a little link love and give you a quick overview of what other experts have been writing about when it comes to “customer feedback” Customer Feedback Listening Posts: In my previous post about customer research trends, I mentioned that collecting feedback has gone far beyond the traditional phone, paper and even online surveys. In this article, Jeff Henning does a terrific job of drilling down into several different customer feedback channels that you can use. Expand Customer… -
3 Ways to Measure Your Social Media Effectiveness
5 Feb 2010 | 7:07 amLet’s face it. Businesses and the left brained among us thrive on what can be measured. Social Media, which can be wildly effective, can also be difficult to measure. Social Media is about reaching the masses and leveraging networks. Think of your Social Media strategy as you would paying for advertising for television. There is a huge potential to reach everyone, but the only way to truly know the effectiveness of a campaign is ultimately how many people respond to the message. Here are three ways we can measure the success of a Social Media Campaign: Response, Reach, and… -
Customer Research Trends for 2010
3 Feb 2010 | 5:20 amTrendwatching isn’t just for designers and marketing and design professionals. Market researchers want to know what’s hot in the world of measuring customer experience as much as everyone else! I’ve pulled together some of the new and trending ways that customers provide information and organizations collect it. Tracking Social Media Conversations. Focus groups used to be the only way to get that special “voice and body language” of the customer without all the cost and logistics involved. Social media applications provide a virtual “room” where… -
The Frequent Responder Paradox
31 Jan 2010 | 11:47 pmThere is a paradox in the market research industry around respondents. We do all we can think of to convince people to take our surveys. When they respond enthusiastically to our pleas and become frequent responders, however, we tend to deride them as “professional respondents,” accuse them of “gaming the system” and doubt the accuracy of their answers. This contradiction can hurt our credibility with the public we are seeking to engage in our research. Moreover, our distrust of frequent responders has been proven to be unfounded. Studies that Survey Sampling International (SSI)… -
Goal or Promise? Which is more Powerful?
29 Jan 2010 | 5:17 amI was watching a video on iLearningGlobal.tv. Bill Bartmann, one of the lecturers on iLearningGlobal was discussing the difference between a goal and a promise. He mentioned a study at Yale Medical School that where 70% of the people who set goals do not meet them but 98% of the people who set promises to themselves meet the promise. So what is the difference between a goal and a promise? A promised is defined as a declaration that something will or will not be done. A goal is defined as the result or achievement toward which effort is directed. Is a promise a specific outcome whereas a goal…
