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About this blog

December 24, 2023

Thanks for visiting this blog. Through my many years as a marketing research practitioner, I came across many basic concepts which researchers just don’t know, don’t think about, or just plainly ignore. So, this blog attempts to serve as a quick reference for marketing researchers to selected topics of statistics and marketing research. It also covers some topics of interest to me which I hope will be of interest to you.   [READ MORE]

Thank you I am done!

December 23, 2023

Thanks to all who have kept me busy with your great (and not-so-great) questions since I started this blog 10 years ago. It is time for me to move on to other things. I will continue to keep this blog alive but won’t update it any longer and also sorry to say I will no longer respond to your email questions. I just need to move on to other things in my life. While I love statistics, I now want to dedicate more of my time to stock investing and trading, photography, artificial intelligence, and travel, which take all of my time. I wish you all the [READ MORE]

How to Analyze Ordinal Variables

October 21, 2022

  I have written a lot about analysing ordinal variables. Here are 5 ways pointed out by Karen Grace-Martin – and she knows well! There are not a lot of statistical methods designed just to analyze ordinal variables. But that doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with few options.  There are more than you’d think. Some are better than others, but it depends on the situation and research questions. Here are five options when your dependent variable is ordinal. 1. Analyze ordinal variables as if they’re nominal Ordinal variables are fundamentally categorical. One simple option is [READ MORE]

Tests of statistical significant can be dangerous and misleading.

September 6, 2022

Years ago we used to programme our IBM PC’s to run t-tests overnight to determine if groups of respondents differ on a series of product attributes. We then highlighted all the attributes with significant differences at p‘<‘.05, p‘<‘.01 and p‘<‘.001 levels and proudly reported to the client which attributes are differentiating and which not. However, after all these years this practice (in many different forms) is still continued by some researchers (though now calculated in a split second), and in total disregard to the validity of a [READ MORE]

More about Sphericity

May 3, 2021

Here is a great article by my friend Andy Field about sphericity. If you are looking for a great intro to SPSS, check out this book by Andy. When it came out in 2013 I worked through it – front to end – and I learned a lot, and it refreshed my memory of many things I have forgotten. He writes in an easy to understand way! [READ MORE]

From Customer Satisfaction Measurement (CSM) to Customer Experience Management (CEM)

November 18, 2020

Lately, I came across several “customer satisfaction surveys” that still focus on the same old question which roughly pose the following to respondents: “On a 10-point-scale, please indicate how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with each of the following statements…”. I just wonder why some (or rather, so many) researchers still have not graduated from this archaic approach and moved on to the disconfirmation of expectations paradigm or the “Gap Model”. While there are operational and contextual differences between the disconfirmation of expectations paradigm and the Gap [READ MORE]

Time for a little joke…

May 22, 2014

Wife of a (marketing research) computer programmer: “Would you please go to the store and buy a carton of milk?  If they have eggs, get six.” A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk. Wife asks him: “Why did you buy 6 cartons of milk?” He replied: “They had eggs”. [READ MORE]