Posts Tagged ‘Sample Metrics’

She’s dead.

By now she would have been too old anyway. So I guess the fact that she’s dead isn’t a tragedy.

I loved dinosaurs when I was a kid. I dreamt of discovering one of my own. Secretly, I still hold them in high esteem.

The subject of their demise has fascinated generations. They say an asteroid did it.

Probably did.

I guess we would all have to agree that an asteroid crashing into earth and kicking up a cloud of dust so thick that the sun disappears from sight is the consummate unpredictable event.

Yet there are scientists who have loud, deep voices and speak in planetariums that will tell you the probability of one coming soon.

How soon?

It’s the kind of mystery that kept me up at night. After all if the asteroid was coming there probably was a lot I wanted to experience before I was twelve.

I guess it would be good to know.

Planning for the unexpected is what insurance companies tell you they are all about. But no insurance company could survive the payout.

Maybe that’s why we need a space shuttle.

I guess there’s not much we can do about a catastrophic global disaster – the ultimate unpredictable event.

Market research depends on the reliability of our sample frame. And if the sampling frame is going to change, we must be able to predict that change. Sample must be reliable and predictable.

Consistency includes the concept of measuring change in our sample frame. If we are really good at it, the more data we compile, the better we will be at predicting that change.

No, asteroids do not fit into our marketing plan, but changes in seasons and cyclic shifts in the economy could find a place.

Throughout the history of market research, we have grounded ourselves to Census Bureau statistics. They changed through time, even though the big count was every ten years. If it didn’t change, the founding fathers could have done it back in the early 1800’s and called it a day.

No the census changed, albeit at a crawl, but the changes provided us with trends. Slow change sounds more like a trend. An asteroid making a big bang does not.

We need metrics in our research that measure change in our sampling frame on a more microscopic basis than the old macroscopic shifts we have counted on all these years. No, we will not capture the asteroid stuff, but seasons make sense.

Now that we are in the age of online research, where fast is the guiding philosophy, it is past time to come up with a family of progressive metrics that give us anchors for our research.

If we don’t we will go the way of my favorite dinosaur. It was discovered by Elizabeth Gomani from Southern Methodist University, who calls Madagascar home. That’s where the big guy laid his head down to rest and that is where Elizabeth found him and wrote her doctorate about him.

My favorite dinosaur is in the picture below. The big one on the right. Sweet as a lamb, couldn’t hurt a fly, unless she stepped on one. She was about the size of a bus.