Answer crucial market research questions

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In the first Statistically Speaking on consumer and market research, our featured guests — three amazing and accomplished PhDs — shared a number of interesting ways to gain a greater understanding of markets and customers to derive better informed policy and product decisions and strategies.

Roselinde Kessels of Maastricht University, Liz Knapp of Avon, and Laura Castro-Schilo of JMP

We had fun along the way, borrowing some poorly designed survey questions from @BadSurveyQ on Twitter and surveying JMP employees about changes to their use of skin care and cosmetic products since the onset of the pandemic.

In her plenary, Roselinde Kessels of Maastricht University shared two discrete choice experiment case studies to help viewers answer the following questions:

• Who are my customers?
• What drives them toward a product or service?
• How can I appeal to them?

The examples she chose are timely. The first was the COVID-19 digital contact tracing application in The Netherlands, including further exploration of the opt-out choices. The second focused on determining COVID-19 vaccine prioritization in Belgium.   

In addition to Roselinde, the panel featured Liz Knapp, senior chemist at Avon, and Laura Castro-Schilo, senior research statistician developer at JMP. The methods used in consumer and market research are broad, and our panelists covered a lot of ground: survey data analysis, text/sentiment analytics, exploratory data analysis/data visualization, and structural equation modeling.

We were hoping to have a sighting of Laura’s puppy, Keefe, but he was asleep in another room for the duration of the webcast. Instead, we’ll have to settle for a photo: 

There were many valuable take-aways from this episode of Statistically Speaking, including:

• The importance of designing experiments carefully.
• The benefits of collaboration.
• Why you should strive to measure and model the unobservable.
• How to gain greater insights and aid long-term product planning by exploring a variety of data (including text).

You can watch it on demand.