Potloc Insights: Consumer research

Consumer research is currently undergoing a transformation due to a number of emerging technologies. Here are eleven noteworthy aspects of this revolution that are tremendously helping market researchers.

In the world of surveys, it is very common that our acquired responses need to be weighted in order to achieve a sample that is representative of some target population. This process of weighting simply consists of assigning a weight (a.k.a. factor) to each respondent and calculating all survey results as a weighted sum of respondents.

For example, we might have surveyed 100 male respondents and 150 female respondents but we're targeting a male/female ratio of 48%/52%. In this simple case, we could achieve the target ratio by weighting the male responses by a factor of 0.48 / (100 / (100 + 150)) = 1.2 and weighting the female responses by 0.52 / (150 / (100 + 150) = 0.867. The technical term for this method of computing weights is Post-Stratification.

However, in a more complex scenario, where we have many different measurable demographic targets, how can we determine weights for all the survey respondents?

Our CEO Rodolphe Barrere writes for Retail TouchPoints about how Social Media is changing research, and the way businesses are extracting insights by tapping into the collective intelligence of B2C and B2B audiences 

Our CEO and Co-Founder, Rodolphe Barrere, explains how Social Sampling is revolutionizing the way consumer research is done in this article for Forbes.

The hardest, but most rewarding, part of sampling both consumer and market research is finding the most relevant and honest participants who can be targeted in a niche way. In doing so, we can meet the time constraints of modern-day sampling.

Let’s be frank: everyone hates surveys. Consumers don’t have the time (or the interest) to give you feedback. So how on earth does Potloc miraculously convince thousands of consumers to participate in their surveys every day, without offering any rewards?