Market Research Articles

In 1997, Steve Jobs said that Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy. Today Apple is the largest company in the world with a net worth of a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars. If you spent a million dollars a day since the birth of Christ, you would still not have spent a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars. A trillion seconds is 31,546 years. A trillion dollars. A trillion is a million millions. One trillion ants would weigh over 3,000 tons. It’s…

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Politics is now a 24/7, 365 activity. As soon as one election is over, the arrows start being slung for the next one. The 2016 Republican primaries with their endless debates and  16 hapless contenders rolled through Fox, CNN, and MSNBC like a slow-moving freight train from 2015 through the spring of 2016 when the most unlikely of the candidates – Donald J. Trump - walked all over some of the biggest names in American politics. https://potus2016.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Trump-republican-debate-election-2016.jpg I don’t know…

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In the early nineteenth century, from about 1820s to 1846s, immense Mexican land grants of tens of thousands of acres dominated the California landscape. The grants covered the soft rolling hills along the coast and inland and became grazing lands for cattle on a thousand hills in the halcyon days of Mexican California. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Massachusetts had become the recognized capital of American shoe manufacturing and the booming new industry needed leather, lots of…

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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was one of the most ruthless dictators in modern history. Lenin was actually a code name that he used in the days of his early revolutionary activities, which he kept. But regardless of the name he used, Lenin engaged in treachery, extortion, blackmail and murder as his weapons to control the Russian government and the country’s population. Picture from https://www.history.com/topics/russia/vladimir-lenin He doesn't measure up to Genghis Khan or Stalin or Mao, but Lenin was responsible for killing…

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I’m not sure how the advertisers did, but I counted 52 Super Bowl commercials Sunday. At a cost of $5.25 million for 30 seconds – more of course for the 45 sec. and one minutes spots – CBS banked a cool $382 million for an afternoon of broadcasting to the 100 million pairs of Brady-watching eyeballs on Super Bowl 53. BURGER KING There were a couple of the commercials that communicated with power and class. And I will share my…

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In early June of 1992, six months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I traveled to Moscow to help a friend open a business college there. Along with a handful of other businessmen, I spoke to a group of about 200 Russian entrepreneurs that had gathered to participate in the inauguration of the college. That's probably about all the entrepreneurs there were in Russia in June of 1992. I spoke on the importance of market research and surveys as…

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