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I’ve recently come across several organizations and websites that aggregate and track facts. The Long Now is a foundation that claims as its goal the fostering of long-term thinking (blog), and companies like Ambient Devices offer cool consumer electronic products that are designed to “datacast,” constantly streaming real-time facts that by their nature are always changing, like the weather, the stock market, oil prices, traffic congestion, etc. (They go well beyond kitchen-window digital thermometers, the “Orb” on the right is one of their products.)
But Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School and associated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, started a fascinating website and blog earlier this year that focus on “mesofacts,” facts that change slowly over time, but which are challenging to track. I’ve been checking the blog periodically to see the various charts and subjects they post.
“These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.” – Excerpt from Boston.com article by Arbesman
I’ve always felt a little challenged by retention of facts. So much of my personal approach to learning has been focused on comprehension and understanding, and pattern recognition, that the details sometimes seem to go, pardon the cliches, “in one ear and out the other,” or are “stuffed into the back of my mind somewhere.” I can’t remember jokes to save a party, and I’m not even as good at music trivia as my friends expect me to be. I studied International Relations in undergrad, but learned about the UN of the 90s, and the political climate of the post-Cold War world; it’s been challenging keeping up with foreign affairs and the state of international communications over the past ten years.
You don’t have to be a trivia buff, a librarian, or a passionate scholar to appreciate tracking of mesofacts of some kind. We all have our interests and challenges in keeping up with the evolution of knowledge on those topics. Your focus may be more academic, historic, entertainment, or even outright silly, but do remember to keep thinking and push yourself to keep up!
Note: We’re always seeking comments for our blog posts, but few people actually submit them! Feel free to tell us about your fact-watching, and especially your sources for keeping up-to-date, in the thread below!
Steve and I have been exploring the online reference site, The Book of Odds. Some of the site’s key functionalities are still in Beta, but for over three years they’ve been compiling odds to create a large database of “the odds of everyday life.” You can sign up for free and provide a little profiling information to begin exploring statements of probability related to your profile, or to anything you want to look up.
The idea is to explore the odds of something happening, and then to calibrate the probability in a comparison. If the topic you explore is included in the database (the four main current topic portals are Health & Illness, Accidents & Death, Relationships & Society, and Daily Life & Activities), you’ll get confirmed probability data on that topic, but you’ll also get leads on unexpected connections, as you compare unrelated events by their likelihood of occurring.
The site also has social and learning functions, and content aside from the odds database (newsletters, blogs, related links, etc.) We’re just getting started exploring this resource, and brainstorming about how we can apply it to our day-to-day reference needs. It’s actually pretty challenging to think about life in terms of probability statements – thinking up queries to get started. But once you dig into the site, there’s quite a bit to learn – not only the small bites of data, but how to calibrate probability, and new approaches to classifying and comparing phenomena.
At what price would you consider this product to be cheap?
At what price would you perceive this product to be too expensive?
At what price would you consider this product to be priced so cheaply that you would worry about its quality?
At what price would you consider this product to be too expensive to even consider buying it?
These four very direct and intuitive questions form the basis of the Van Westendorp pricing exercise – a quantitative research technique that can actually yield robust and compelling data reflecting consumer demand. We’ve been thinking about the wide variety of quantitative analytical techniques we use in our work, and thought we’d provide a quick overview on this one.
The Van Westendorp pricing exercise is a price sensitivity measurement devised by a Dutch psychologist, Peter van Westendorp. This technique uses four questions about a product or service (drafted more or less like those above) and requires the respondent to gauge prices that are too cheap and too expensive in context with the product or service’s offerings and perceived benefits.
Frequency distributions from these questions are derived and plotted, yielding the range of pricing options for the product. As the final step in this process, purchase intent is measured at the highest and lowest prices in the range of pricing options. The optimal price (i.e., the price which maximizes market share while generating the highest possible revenue) can then be computed, along with the precise range of acceptable pricing.
The data points on the example chart are plotted a little loosely, but the point at which the Too Cheap and Too Expensive responses intersect is considered the Optimal Price Point (OPP). The intersection of Expensive and Too cheap yields the Point of Marginal Cheapness (PMC). At this price point, the number of people considering the product to be too cheap is the same as the number considering it to be expensive.
The intersection of Cheap and Too Expensive yields the Point of Marginal Expensiveness (PME). At this price point, the same number of people regard the product to be too expensive as regard it cheap. The range from PMC to PME is the Range of Acceptable Prices (RAP), or the Optimal Price Band.
We also conduct pricing studies using conjoint and discrete choice designs, but the Van Westendorp pricing method is the most efficient way to evaluate price sensitivity itself, as the resulting data resulting is easy to interpret, identifies an entire range of acceptable price points, and provides a solid basis to assess future pricing strategies, ensuring that the optimal price-value balance is established. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about this research technique.
I’ve published quotes to the W5 Blog before, but we’re going to try to institute a new series pulling relevant or thought-provoking statements and linking you through to the sources. We may not add commentary for these quotes, but each will have some connection to what we do and the other topics we post about on the blog. Like our “Infographic of the Week” posts, we’ll publish these as they come up, rather than on a set schedule. To kick things off, here’s a swipe with two good quotes on the need to combine hard science and marketing, especially in this economic climate:
Do you think the push toward testing and metrics in advertising will get stronger?
Steve Cuno, author of Prove It Before You Promote It: How to Take the Guesswork Out of Marketing: Ads have to earn their keep. I can’t peer into the future, but I can tell you one thing. When a company is fat and has money to burn and just loves an ad campaign, sometimes they’ll keep it as an expression of the ego and as a personal indulgence. If you’re not fat and don’t have money to burn, the fact that you love the campaign is irrelevant. You simply want to know if it is producing.
Some CEOs are saying their companies cannot afford to market as they have in the past because of the recession. Should companies cut their marketing budget during tight economic times?
Cuno: It’s very telling when companies cut marketing budgets. The idea of marketing is to sell stuff and raise profits. If you cut your budget because things are tight, it’s an admission that deep down inside you suspect your marketing isn’t selling. Why else would you cut marketing? When things are tight and you know your marketing is working, you will increase it. Cutting effective marketing when sales are down is like cutting insulin because someone’s diabetes got worse.
Quote pulled from an interesting Deliver Magazine interview here
I love sports. I love infographics. Therefore, this site, FlipFlopFlyBall really hit the spot. It offers several dozen, fresh, beautifully-designed infographics that show you a side of sports that you don’t usually see. Take the above graphic, for example. It’s a lovely poster that shows the relative size and shape of the thirty MLB parks.
While it focuses heavily on baseball, the site seems to be delving into other sports. Note the “size comparison of lots of sporty balls” towards the bottom of the page.
Enjoy.
Big news! We have launched W5 Conjoint, in conjunction with our newest W5 white paper, “W5 on Conjoint Analysis.”
W5 Conjoint is a specialized analytical boutique of W5, a custom market research consultancy. We have launched the website to introduce the boutique, to complement the white paper, and to serve as a resource for those interested in the understanding, use, and benefits of conjoint methodologies.
W5 Conjoint specializes in the application and design of conjoint analysis for Fortune 500s and their respective advertising agencies. While we’re focused on specific analytical techniques, we’re still W5 consultants – curious, attuned to the needs of our clients, and focused on actionable results that help strengthen brands.
Check out the links and contact us for more information!
The Techneos team have started a blog in the past few weeks to publish their thoughts about trends in the mobile survey research world.
We’ve found mobile survey research very useful in the past for studies that are aimed at B2B targets, or highly mobile and/or tech-savvy consumers. With the growth of smartphone and netbook usage, particularly over the past couple of years, this methodology seems more and more vital. It’s great to be able to connect with research participants while they’re on the go, or engaged in their lives (whether for work or play) – not just when they find time to check their email or call back for a phone interview.
We find that expertise in both questionnaire design and data management is absolutely necessary to do in-depth analysis on data collected through this medium. It’s important to be concise in wording your questions and answer options, and you need more than just quick polling data to illuminate insights that lie beneath and behind survey responses. But that’s why we’re here – to recommend a technology solution if and when it’s appropriate for a research initiative, and to exercise our skills and perspectives to take the strategic insights to the next level.
In conducting quantitative marketing research, analysts have an arsenal of tools and methods that may be employed to develop insight. W5 consultants are constantly developing our analytical techniques [link], and a few of these methods, segmentation and conjoint for example, have become core competencies.
For these types of projects, smart study design is critical, but for the most part these analytical techniques are applied post hoc, in interpretation of trends and spikes that emerge across a large numerical data set. We love this type of work, but we only recommend such an approach if our client’s overall strategic and specific research objectives seem to call for it.
Sometimes, marketing research objectives are best addressed not so much through application of post hoc analytical techniques, but on the front end of the project – through development of a direct, customized, in-depth line of questioning. Read the rest of this entry »
