Kate Crawford, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, has written a provocative post on the HBR Blog titled, “The Hidden Biases in Big Data.” She quotes former Wired Editor-In-Chief, Chris Anderson, as saying, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." Crawford then asks, can numbers actually speak for themselves?

Crawford’s answer is a simple no. She states:

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them and define their meaning through our interpretations. ...

OK, this could be a SCLM (severe career limiting move), but I think there are some questions that market research is just not well-suited to answer. Horror! Has Nigel gone over to the dark side of market research bashing? No, but that does not mean I think market research can do everything that people might demand of it.

I have been mulling this idea over for a while, but the post “Return and Ridicule” by Fred Wilson (via Dan Calladine’s highly useful newsletter), catalyzed what I have been thinking about. In the post, Wilson states:

I have found ...

Here we go again. It seems that European Supermarket Magazine (ESM) has published an article titled, “Valuing Your Brand - What's $100 Million Between Friends?” in which it highlights differences between the valuations made by BrandZ™ and Interbrand.  

As I noted in this post last year, discrepancies in brand valuation seem to be of perennial interest to the media. Yes – shock, horror – two different methodologies produce two different estimates of brand value. So too do valuations placed on company shares by different investors, valuation of houses by different estate agents (realtors) and valuation of art by ...

I have spent the last couple of weeks on an extended business trip to South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. The experience has confirmed that without a doubt, mobile communication is the next big opportunity for brands on that continent, but only if marketers learn from mistakes made elsewhere and treat their audience with respect.

According to Millward Brown’s AdReaction report 2012, mobile phones are central to many African’s lives. For instance, 96 percent of Kenyans agree that their mobile phone helps them be more efficient (19 percent higher than the global average) and 84 percent agree that it is ...

My colleague, Graham Page, passed me a copy of USA Today’s January 21st edition and suggested I might want to read Michael Wolff’s article, “Don’t write print ads off just yet.” In the article, Wolff decries the state of the print advertising art and seeks to pitch the medium’s strengths versus the allure of TV and digital. Unfortunately, I don’t think that in the process Wolff does print advertising or himself any favors.

Wolff was roused to take a stand for print advertising by the quality of submissions to USA Today’s competition to encourage creativity in ...

My dad always ascribes any business success I may have enjoyed to my “sleazy charm.” Thanks, Dad. I would like to think there might be other factors at play, but the ability to charm can play an important role in business relationships. But until now I had not really thought of advertising as “charming” people.

Les Binet refers to the need for brands to be charming in the course of this presentation given at Thinkbox’s event, “Advertising Effectiveness: the long and the short of it.” 

The video is well worth viewing in its entirety, since it reviews an important extension ...

Qualitative researchers have long had the advantage of being able to watch people’s faces to assess their instinctive reaction to stimuli, and then see whether that reaction matches what they actually say. 

But when Millward Brown partnered with Affectiva in January 2012, and integrated Affectiva’s Affdex facial coding software with Millward Brown’s Link™, this capability was extended to quantitative pre-testing. This innovation known as Link™ + Facial Coding was recognized last week with the MRS/ASC award for Technology Effectiveness.

A couple of times in recent years, I have been asked why we do not show respondents’ facial expressions ...

Tectonic shifts continue to take place in the world of media. Online is now challenging TV for the top media slot in the USA. In 2012 to date, Google alone generated more ad revenue than all newspapers combined and nearly as much as magazines. But yet another change is taking place. In a few years, smartphones will be the dominant means by which people consume digital content and interact with apps and ads.

Mobile is the do-it-all, emerging giant of the digital domain. The growth figures are staggering and as penetration of smartphones permeates beyond the richest in each ...

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a meeting at a private bank in Beijing, China. I had taken a copy of my book, The Global Brand as a gift, but that proved unnecessary. Not only had our contact already bought a copy, he had also bought a copy of Jim Stengel’s Grow. And subsequent questions not only proved he had read the books, but he was already actively trying to apply the learning to his business.

My reason for being at the meeting was to share the ValueDrivers framework and demonstrate that it applies just as well to ...

I have no doubt that big data will have a big impact in many areas including market research, but readers of this blog will know that I am skeptical about many of the claims made about the utility of big data. So a Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog post titled “Big Data Hype (and Reality)” was bound to get my attention.

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro presents some interesting examples to support his case. For instance, he discusses the Netflix challenge as a case where big data analysis failed to improve significantly on the existing ability to predict user preferences. You ...