twitter streaming live from CES Vegas

http://live.twit.tv/

Guys, great streaming - simply great!!

Posted via email from yusof's posterous

Consumer Electronics Show/Guardian Coverage/Retweet

This was originally a tweet from Guardiantech - The Guardian's technology blog on Twitter, so this is more like a retweet. My "normal" favorites were: the Que reader from Plastic Logic, the
coverage on Steve Ballmer's keynote address at the forum (Gmail spell check does not recognize the name :-)), TV glasses that allow you to see big-screen video from your mobile device inside a pair of goggles and a video technology that senses your movements and transfers them
to the digital domain (the combination is likely to sell for less than USD 100, so it's cheap). I have shared the link below (better than the link to an index page that Guardiantech provided) and a train of thought on one of the innovations on display:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/ces

The "abnormal" favorite was the video on virtual reality and how VR entrepreneurs are making money out of the medium - real money being made out of virtual commerce in virtual games. It is possible that I missed something here but while the idea might seem fantastically
weird to many, I found it interesting from a different perspective. All this while market researchers, analysts and marketing professionals had been thinking in terms of serving up markets by segments that were not only different in terms of their attitudinal
and lifestyle characteristics but also, in terms of a demographic separation that allowed one to serve markets by clearly assuming that certain demographic segments have common attitudes, tastes, lifestyles and product preferences. Come post-modernism and the lifestyle bit was
reinforced and we were looking at consumer communities that shared common lifestyles but could be global in nature. However, demographics remained a mainstay for easily typing consumers at least in so far as age was concerned (not surprisingly, the "baby boomer" roots of much of this stuff is not easy to overcome) and stage of the household (in the US). In technology products in a developing world context, education remains important and will continue to be so and this is an obvious exception to what I ramble about below.

My take on this is (and I do need some feedback here) is whether within the same demographic, people make distinct lifestyle choices depending on different personality types which brings us back either to a second layer of segmentation once target segments by demographic
type was determined or to one of two choices a) decide on your target demographic - do a preliminary MR scan on the demographic to determine receptivity to your concept/product/service and then drill further to personality types within the demographic for your positioning b) forget demographics all-together and segment on personality types.
Obviously, the choice between the three depends on whether you are looking at a broad-based product/concept or a niche concept. The latter is what VR is about. The difference again, depends on whether your concept is disruptive in the same way as VR is, which determines
which part of the adoption curve you need to capitalize on. Thus while the concept may have appeared, at the first, as a no-go, there obviously is a type, a segment to whom this appeals immensely. Virtual commerce, of course, has a different dimension - while many real world commodities cannot have virtual counterparts with the same utility value, recent advances in sensory technologies and real-virtual interfaces (fluid interfaces) does provide immense
opportunities for providers of entertainment and social media content - virtual discotheques, adult dating services and the sex industry. These are industries where the offering is broad based in terms of not being for a particular demographic (except discotheques, the rest are
for 18-60 and beyond) but where the technology itself is new and would appeal only to a particular segment (we note here that an early adopter of the Que need not necessarily be an early adopter of VR entertainment and thus, typing from the adoption curve of general
technology products is not of much value here.Typing from the adoption curve for Internet dating and porn is a more reliable guidepost.) Thus personality typing takes precedence and demographic typing is only of secondary curiosity value.

Even while I was playing with this idea - (the idea track was Brand personality --> Human Personality Types --> Big 5 --> Nanogram -->personality traits based segmentation), I chanced upon a consumer trends report which suggests that this is gaining ground. I will post
that in sometime (a retweet again).

Posted via email from yusof's posterous

Commercial Qualitative Market Research

It is difficult when you are handed down a paradigm and asked to fit in – especially so when you think that your data does not fit the paradigm. This can happen when you are working with an intelligent client who also dabbles in quick and ready research. Paradigms never fit neatly into qualitative data – especially when your paradigm comes from outside the research and you want to fit in your findings to relationships between broad constructs that come from elsewhere – prior work, ubiquitous commonsense etc.

This is where I would turn against myself and ask about for micro-research – unified fields are good for the synthetic imagination but what if they do not exist? At the micro level – what if the data fit into smaller chunks (many factors) – unless you are able to replicate the research many times or follow up on certain hypotheses, it does look improbable that you will be able to tie these factors together. But if the number of such factors is not so large as to become unwieldy, overarching theories may not be necessary and a peace-meal digestion may work  better by ensuring that the details are not lost in overarching theory. In practical business problems, this may be of great help until new facts pour in. But most of us will not be able to resist the tendency to come up more intelligent than we are – grandiose is a virtue we Indians adore. But to hell with the facts?

Look at it this way – most grandiose theories are but commonsense made more presentable – unless they contradict something that we would have considered intuitive and have data backing this contrary finding. If I can give you 5 action points to push sales of your skin care product in Salem, does it matter to you whether I present them to you neatly packaged under people, processes, strategy, promotions etc. (worse still, under the 4Ps one gets to see in business analytics presentations) and then bring in some folk wisdom to hold them together? There is nothing wrong with the packaging –in fact, these packages serve as useful mnemonic guides. The trouble starts when you start brining in your pet theories (or your manager’s) to tie together different parts of the package.

I am tempted to believe that most research remains in the boardrooms – they are discussed, presented, clapped for (now, you need real hot looking theory building for that) but rarely acted on. This is mostly true for small and medium companies. But theories can be important when you need to reinterpret findings to fit your pre-decided action plan. Then you say – look data says this (it doesn’t – there’s no data, there is theory) and I am all for scientific management!

The above sounds pathetically phobic. However, I am beginning to believe that qualitative data is a serious threat to sound management practice until we learn to do the following:

·         Build theory only the basis of prior work where substantial prior work exists

·         Where prior work does not exist, test your hypothesis – follow-up with more research

o   More intensive and focused research around a few key unanswered questions

o   A larger research piece with more cases (larger sample) and more stringent hypothesis acceptance criteria

·         Post-code and go only as far as a numerical frequency analysis of codes if none of the above are possible. Linking codes into a theoretical network is risky unless

o   There are clear co-occurrence patterns

o    There is earlier empirical work validating your links

In most real life commercial problems, one is working under short timelines, prior work in the specific project area is rare to come by, the research is very context specific and one does not have the luxury of a full-fledged research program. Clippings from industry publications and the  general business press can, however, feed into your research armory (its convenient to have web-clipping tools here rather than rely on manual copy-paste – try Evernote). This can be bolstered by interviews with select industry experts, trackers. It is best to run your code networks through a couple of industry experts – look for dissonances and rely on a quick Delphi to generate your final network of codes. BTW, I love Atlas.ti and its features for creating codes, meta-codes and code networks.

Build all this beforehand into your research proposal – anticipate areas where you might need to fill in the blanks. If you proceed with care, you can still come up with something useful for managerial decision making. Also, at the end of the day, you would have a good night's sleep!

Posting across platforms now with "posterous"

One does not get to hear too much about utilities like tweetdeck or posterous or ping.fm in general conversation in physical space - perhaps because not many of those I know there are really interested. This is convenient - I have just added Facebook (which I hardly ever visit on the web), linkedin, twitter and blogger on posterous. A focussed post on Jennifer Aaker's Brand Perception Scale led to Evanreas, an ex-Stanford student following me and I following him which led to my finding tweetdeck and then by following Percival whom Evanreas was following, posterous.

I am not surprised by the learning path - Social Networking is also one of Aaker's teaching and research interests which accidentally got me to the right information I wanted. I bet that if I were to follow David Aaker (assuming he is on Twitter too), I would serendipitously (or now, not so serendipitously) end up with loads of information on Branding Strategies and Brand Research. I'll try this track or a similar one in a few days and keep you guys posted. 

However, it would have been much better had I had posterous as a desktop icon. I strongly recommend posterous to all of you - its much more convenient to attach photos, Videos and MP3s to  your email then having to upload this stuff to these sites. What's more, these guys also support Picassa and Flikr and YouTube. 

Looks like, I can now be more regular and not have to disappear every once in a while. Also, I need to be able to post to evernote using my email and then sync between the web and local versions when I find time.

Posted via email from yusof's posterous