Peter Capelli recently wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal suggesting that it’s time to do away with employee surveys. Like similar calls for doing away with performance reviews, there are some very good reasons to seriously consider doing away with them—many people don’t like them, response rates are often very low and, all too often, nothing is really done with the information received which serves to demotivate rather than engage employees.
However, I really wouldn’t agree with just getting rid of either employee surveys or performance reviews. With employee surveys, though, I would agree that many surveys are not done well and may not be yielding reliable, valid, and actionable information for HR leaders, managers, and organizations.
Market research is definitely something that even very small businesses can do on their own but there are a lot of myths and misconceptions related to research that can cause them to make decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information. While it’s impossible to cover everything related to doing research well, here are some general strategies and best practices that businesses of any size can put to use to leverage the value of gathering market research to improve their business offerings and marketing effectiveness.
Every business has competitors and needs to successfully position itself against those competitors to succeed in the marketplace. Creating a competitive analysis matrix can be a good way to help you identify areas of opportunity for your business and its products and services. Here we show you how.
Competitors are a fact of life for businesses of all types and sizes. Even if you think you have no competition (and some companies do think this), you do! We like to define competition, broadly, as “any available alternative to what you have to offer.” For instance, I worked in the healthcare industry for a number of years, leading the organization’s marketing efforts. We had direct competitors (other hospitals and clinics) serving the same market we served. We also had indirect competitors—Google search for instance. How often have you gone online to find information about some medical issue rather than make an appointment to see the doctor?
Businesses spend a lot of time and money trying to gain insights into how customers perceive their product or service offerings. This might involve conducting surveys and focus groups to hear directly from customers. Or, it might involve efforts to ascertain customer preferences based on online behavior and purchase decisions. And yet, despite the general accessibility of this type of information, so many businesses still misread customers. That lack of awareness limits their ability to improve the customer experience. 
Behavioral economics is the study of how and why consumers do not always act rationally —rational behavior is one of the fundamental assumptions underlying classical economics. Behavioral economics helps explain things like why consumers make impulse purchases and incorrectly value goods and services. Two of my favorite behavioral economists are Dan Ariely and Steven D. Levitt, authors of 
What event or events would you say have had the greatest impact on the United States during YOUR lifetime? It’s a question put to 2,025 adult survey respondents in a mid-2016 Pew Research Center poll, the results of which were 
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