Not the other one.
Great article by Avinash of Occam’s Razor on adding context to your audience metrics.
So what is this mysterious magic potion?
Its quite simple really, in its simplest form it is surrounding your Metrics, Key Performance Indicators, Reports, Dashboards etc with other information (quantitative, qualitative, tribal knowledge) that adds a pinch of color. Context.
Despite a suggestion to the contrary, Ray Poynter suggests that land lines are becoming increasingly rare, and that it’s not only the “socially excluded and the odd” that are sans terrestrial telecommunications.
I’m with Ray. I haven’t had a land line since 2002.
Via Daring Fireball, lots of interesting bits in this Fortune article on Apple. Their sales per square foot is hard to fathom:
And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 — tops for electronics retailers — while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.
But the thing that caught my eye was the genesis of the Genius Bar:
“When we launched retail, I got this group together, people from a variety of walks of life,” says Johnson. “As an icebreaker, we said, ‘Tell us about the best service experience you’ve ever had.’” Of the 18 people, 16 said it was in a hotel. This was unexpected. But of course: The concierge desk at a hotel isn’t selling anything; it’s there to help. “We said, ‘Well, how do we create a store that has the friendliness of a Four Seasons Hotel?’” The answer: “Let’s put a bar in our stores. But instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice.”
I don’t normally think of Apple being a company that would use a lot of market research. In fact I’ve read several times that they make a point not to. (And wasn’t the Newton largely a product of focus groups?) I guess the distinction here is that they are researching general market attitudes, not fishing for reactions to a design, which, as Gladwell has argued, is frequently misleading. It would be interesting to see how many guerrilla research projects of this type they conduct.
If you’re at all involved in marketing research you should definitely check out the ResearchTalk podcasts. They’re a collection of conversations, interviews, and conference sound bytes with various research industry luminaries. It’s surprisingly well produced and the hosts are very sharp. The Daily Research News Online bits in particular are worthwhile — they seem to hover around the 5 or 6 minute mark which makes for really easy consumption.
