Article bank

The working archive of this site: short papers on B2B marketing, market research method, product development and customer measurement.

The article bank is the oldest and largest part of this site. Each entry is a short paper on one problem — how to word a question, when a focus group earns its cost, what a satisfaction score can and cannot tell you, why most new products fail. The addresses are the original ones, so old links still land where they always did.

Net Promoter Score

The most widely adopted customer metric in business, and the gap between how confidently it is used and how well it is evidenced.

Unlocking employee commitment and performance

The link between employee engagement and business outcomes is one of the best-evidenced findings in applied research — and one of the most misapplied.

Maximise growth through customer satisfaction

Satisfaction drives loyalty, loyalty drives profit — a chain that is real, weaker than usually claimed, and conditional on things most programmes …

Brand reputation

Reputation is measurable, and the measurement is not a satisfaction score with a new label. What the validated instruments actually capture.

Retail: the influence of sales promotions

Price promotions reliably move volume this week. The long-run evidence on what they do to the brand afterwards is much less comfortable.

Raising the visibility of marketing with the board

Marketing loses budget arguments it should win because it brings the wrong evidence. What changes when the metrics are built for a finance audience.

Interactive reporting formats: focused information delivery

Research gets ignored at the reporting stage more often than at any other. What the data-visualisation literature says about dashboards that are …

Online business panels: extending the capability of online research

Panels made online business research affordable. The accuracy evidence explains what you are trading away, and where the errors actually come from.

Online focus groups: establishing those impossible focus groups

Online groups solve the recruitment problem that kills specialist B2B qualitative work — at the cost of some of what makes a group a group.

CATI: providing best-in-class telephone research

What separates a well-run computer-assisted telephone study from a badly run one, and why the difference rarely shows up in the topline.

In-house CATI vs outsourcing: weighing up the benefits

The build-or-buy decision for telephone fieldwork, and the costs that only show up after the first study.

From research to loyalty marketing: the many uses of telephone research

The telephone survives as a research mode because of what it can do that self-completion cannot: reach a named individual, probe an answer and control …

Best practice for international research projects

Multi-country studies fail on translation and comparability far more often than on fieldwork. What the cross-cultural survey literature recommends …

The quest for the holy grail: ask the right questions

Most survey failures are written into the questionnaire before a single interview takes place. What forty years of question-wording research actually …