Market Research Articles

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…

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…

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…

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…

One of the products of a marketing survey is a “Button.” Kind of an odd word for something from a marketing activity. But don’t let that fool you – it’s vitally important. A button is a point of agreement among a particular public about a product or service. A button results from a survey question and is used in marketing to get the attention of the company's perspective buyers. “What do you consider to be the single most important factor…

I was at a website reading about the circus – the latest from Washington - when I noticed an article to the right of the one I was reading – you know how those articles pop up along the right side of the main story – it caught my attention because it said Starbucks had commenced selling alcohol in some of their cafés and they were going to expand the offerings to thousands of their stores. They were calling the…