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Brief reflections on 2021, our plans for the future, and our faves from the cusp of 2022. Hi. 2021 ended for our little team with a grim flourish of grief, illness, and other forms of bad news, so we’ve all been simply trying to recover from that before we
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We're trying to create the conditions for a truly representative sample in market research - want to help? The tl;dr - we’re building a qualitative research recruitment panel that is designed to be inclusive and accessible from the ground up. If you or someone you know
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What marketers take for granted about how people make decisions; why it took the pandemic for researchers to adopt remote methods; the value of the beginner's perspective Only a day late this time (and we’ve switched to Substack, because, well, we want the option of alt-text on
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As you probably already know, The Difference Engine conducts qualitative research, and we’ve spent some time over the past few months discussing industry trends & patterns and analyzing our own methods for running research. In a recent conversation, we concluded that there is not much information out there about
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Today’s lesson: Emotional Leakage and Facial Recognition Software in Market Research There are lots of ways that facial recognition technology can be put to use; but one industry that has already demonstrated a lot of interest is the marketing business. Advertisers, market researchers have dabbled in facial recognition both
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A note about a thing you don’t need to worry about and a technology you don’t need to use. I recently stumbled upon an article in Axios about how the $15 minimum wage is unpopular with swing voters. It suggested that President Biden might abandon including the proposal
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Chuck Schumer has imaginary friends OH MY GOD DO USER RESEARCH DON’T SOLELY RELY ON PERSONAS https://t.co/g6VDC7e4hY — Dan Hon (@hondanhon) February 16, 2021 This pictured text is from a profile from 2007 in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg. Let’s just quote the thing: Schumer
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With a brief explanation of why you absolutely should I had such a good time explaining how to do observational research, that I thought I’d also take a moment to explain how to do secondary (a.k.a., “desk”) research. In my view, you can’t even begin to
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The first in a limited series about what brand & communications strategists should do *before* they write a creative brief Author’s note: Yesterday I wrote a series of tweets about this, but thought it might be useful to assemble them in one short article, and address some of the
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To understand the conditions for more meaningful civic participation, we need to get off The Ladder. (All these beautiful drawings below were created by Vinay Kumar Mysore) When it comes to discussions about how to get those who seem to be “unengaged” more engaged with civic life, one metaphor comes
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First of all, hi. It’s been a minute, and you might notice that we’re no longer meeting each other over on tinyletter. I’ve migrated to Substack. I have reasons. Hopefully it won’t make a bit of difference to your experience at all. Though probably that logo