Market Research Articles
Left-handed golfers in Houston and the Ukraine
[caption id="attachment_1016" align="aligncenter" width="1292"] Courtesy of cottonbro - Pixels[/caption] It was a little while ago that a friend, trying to give an example of how difficult it would be to survey very niche audiences, challenged our ability to survey left-handed golfers in Houston. He was trying to be funny but was surprised when I told him that we could survey that public today – no problem. Technology has dramatically expanded the ability to survey niche publics in both the…
I Have Put My 49’rs Disappointment Behind Me
I have consoled myself with the fact that the 49ers won, if not the Super Bowl, the NFC championship in Garoppolo’s first full season and he’ll be back. And I have given Patrick Mahomes his due. The kid is 24 and will be a force in the NFL for some time. Hell, he may be the ghost of the great Otto Graham ([Graham]”He is the greatest winner among quarterbacks ever, and that cannot be disputed: seven championships in 10 professional…
Controversy by Survey?
I grew up in a little town in the San Francisco East Bay called Lafayette. In those days it was little more than a suburban bump in the road: couple of bars, a drugstore with a fountain counter, a barbershop, movie theater (admission: $.25), a pizza parlor and lots of vacant fields full of walnut trees. And there was a gas station at the main intersection in town, owned by the grand nephew of Wild Bill Hickok. I would…
Interest rates are bipolar.
Following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, international bankers pushed rates to zero and sat on them for several years opening the door for commercial banks to lend money to corporate clients that cost them nothing. In 2017 they began ratcheting rates up. Like a financial social climber at a debutante’s ball, interest rates edged up throughout the remainder of 2017, and 2018. In December 2018, the Chairman of the Fed said two additional increases were scheduled for 2019. It…
1984
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR George Orwell’s classic novel of a dystopian future overseen by the all-seeing despot, Big Brother, embodied omnipresent government surveillance, perpetual war and historical negationism (the rewriting of history). It is a portrayal of government power and suppression of individual freedoms far beyond Orwell’s 1949 England and today’s governmental operations… or is it? If one were looking for a perpetual…
