3251 blog

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/12/06/unauthorized-immigrants-11-1-million-in-2011/

The above link is for an article about the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. in 2000 there were just over 8 million unauthorized immigrants in the country, and today's totals top 11 million.

While I definitely recognize that there are a lot of illegal immigrants in the US, I'm curious as to how anyone comes up with a good estimate of how many are actually here. It's interesting that none of these articles that talk about these figures ever present how they got their data.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/159089/religion-major-factor-americans-opposed-sex-marriage.aspx

This is an article about how religion plays a key role in the debate on same-sex marriage.
Of those that opposed same-sex marriage, almost half (47%) said that because their Religion/Bible said it was wrong.

One thing I think would be interesting to look at is the age range of those that opposed same-sex marriage. Older people tend to have more traditional beliefs, and I think for the most part those are the same people that oppose same-sex marriage, because they're not used to it.

http://www.greenbook.org/marketing-research.cfm/green-tech-segmentation

The above link is a Greenbook article on the issue of "going green."

Recently Rockbridge Associates conducted it's "National Technology Readiness Survey," in which they include a "green" segment that identified different types of green:

Green Tech Leaders (10%)
Green Tech followers (18%)
Tech-savvy green sympathizers (31%)
Enviro-friendly Skeptics (22%)
Naive Consumers (12%)
Anti-Greens (7%)

I thought it was really interesting to see this pie chart split up because I didn't realize there were so many different kinds of people involved in the green movement. It was also surprising that only 7% of people were completely against the movement, I thought this number would have been at least a little bit higher.

A recent survey by MediaBrix found that the majority of online adults who have seen advertising appearing as content in the last twelve months say that the ads negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised. What's more intriguing in this survey is when they asked about three specific ad types:

62% of those who had seen them in the past 12 months said Twitter promoted tweets negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised.

72% of those who had seen them in the past 12 months said Facebook sponsored stories negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised.

85% of those who had seen them in the past 12 months said sponsored video ads that appear to be content negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised.

This is interesting because these number are all well over a majority. And I think it partially due to the lifestyles of many young people in today's world. They are always on the go, and they desire immediacy. I think that is something advertisers need to think about when targeting certain age groups.

This is an article from PewResearch about the near-end fiscal period and what many people are calling the "fiscal cliff." This is a word cloud of the public's one word responses about the 2011 debt ceiling battle that took place last summer

http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/wordle10.png

The same thing might happen if Obama and lawmakers don't come up with a plan that is pleasing to the American people. The article also shows a graph of approval ratings for the Obama Administration over his first term:

http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/approval112112.png

After looking at this, I don't understand how so many people voted to re-elect the same President. Even Obama's own administration hardly has a majority that approve!

http://adage.com/article/digital/solve-media-launches-brand-research-tool-disguised-a-captcha/235174/

This was an article I found on AdAge about a media company that found a clever way to do brand research. The big idea was captcha's. Solve first began by asking the user to type in a brand's slogan or tag line. Since then they have progressed to asking users to type in things like a brand's message.

I thought this was a very smart and interesting way to gain a consumer insight about a brand. It's one of those you had wished you thought of yourself. Also the way they built up to what they eventually wanted to gain through the research was a very smart move on their part. If they hadn't began the research by doing more simple answers like the tagline, users might not have been so inclined to use the captcha's.

http://pewinternet.org/Infographics/2012/Digital-Politics.aspx

This article talked about how the political atmosphere in the United States has changed dramatically due to the popularity of social networking. The article stated that 69% of US adults use at least one social media platform, 37% of those have since 2008.

One thing about this study I found interesting was that Liberals had a higher rate of usage for both Twitter and Facebook. Looking back on the election this year, this could have potentially given Obama a huge advantage. However, I also read an article about a study done earlier this year that would argue this point. This article claimed that while a majority of US adults use social media, it does not influence their political status.

It will be interesting to see where politics end up a few years down the road after social media has been established for longer.

This PewResearch article is all about the positive and negative impacts of mobile phone use. According to the article, 85% of American adults have a cell phone, and of those 29% say they "couldn't live without it." Another statistic I found very intriguing was that 18% of cell phone owners say they frequently check their phones even when they don't have a new call or message.

This article was really interesting because it is extremely relevant to my lifestyle, and the lifestyles of most of my classmates. I would definitely consider myself part of the 18 percent that check their phones with no new messages or phone calls, just out of habit. I never really thought about the little things like that before.

I just participated in the bottled water survey that a U of M student was conducting. The survey asked questions about how often I drink bottled water and who I thought was the typical bottled water drinker. It was a short survey, only 10 questions, but they were all open ended for the most part, and there was a lot of room for my responses.

One of the more interesting questions that surprised me in the survey asked me to name groups of people or individuals that I thought would approve of drinking bottle water regularly. I think the researcher was trying to find out the proportion of people that don't really care about where they get their water from (i.e. non-environmentally friendly).

We have finally completed all the primary and secondary research necessary to move forward with our campaign. We found a lot of helpful insights about our brands and our target markets. The whole process took about 2 and a half months, but it probably would've been faster if we didn't have such a large group of people. It just takes longer for communication, execution, etc.

In our primary research we totaled nearly 1000 survey respondents, 20 in-depth interviews, and conducted 3 focus groups, one for each target, which are some pretty good numbers given the circumstances.

This is the first time I have ever really conducted research on this large of a scale, and it was really cool to look at the results afterwards.