The personal and professional worlds tend to mesh for Larry Finkel, Market Research Director. During more than a dozen years providing expert business intelligence as a top Research Specialist, he's danced at client weddings, lent them a shoulder during marital strife, cheered when their children received college acceptance letters.

Are you flying blind on market research? What is your market research strategy plan? How do you find a quality market research report? Knowing where to locate reliable high quality research for your industry is essential for the continual growth of your company.

In last night's State of the Union address President Barack Obama cited employment data in challeging U.S. businesses to improve the domestic manufacturing outlook.

At first, we thought the hardest part was convincing our Mom that she shouldn't drive any more.

But two years after getting Mom to relinquish the car keys, my two older siblings and I are learning that taking care of an aging parent has many, many 'hard parts.'  Moreover, we've learned that the American healthcare system isn't terribly helpful to adult children of modest means who want to provide a safe, clean, engaging living arrangement for aging parents of limited means.

You wouldn't know it from what you "read in the news" lately, but for the past several years the food and beverage industry has been making efforts to meet rising consumer demand for healthy food that fosters health and wellness.

Last September, the world's biggest fast food company, McDonald's, announced a plan to begin listing calorie counts for all menu items in its thousands of North American restaurants.  The move was in response to growing concerns from consumer advocates, public health officials and doctors about the on-going obesity epidemic in the United States.

During the past decade, the arrival of new technology has increased opportunities for small businesses to improve efficiency by developing targeted e-mail campaigns and other digital-based initiatives. Within the past few years, Big Data has also emerged as another tantalizing possibility for small business data strategies -- if also one that is rife with challenges:

• Can a 50-100 employee company with limited capital genuinely expect to develop a sustainable revenue growth strategy from Big Data?
• Can small businesses craft Big Data-based initiatives that are cost-effective? 
• How would such a strategy take shape?
• For brick-and-mortar small businesses offering consumer goods, especially, does it make sense to devote precious financial and employee resources toward wrestling down Big Data?
  
• What kind of market research exists to help guide small companies that are eager to utilize Big Data?
  

Can Big Data positively impact revenues for mid-sized and small business data strategies? Last week we asked when the market research community will develop strategies and tactics to define terms for Big Data's use across industries:

As market researchers confront the era of Big Data, it is time to ask key questions about its usability, its potential to affect how they do their work -- and how it impacts the customers who purchase their work. Google, of course, is a major player in the Big Data landscape, but smart business-owners know that accurate, reliable market research tailored to their specific needs requires far more specificity and targeting than the search engine giant can provide.

Last year "Big Data" emerged as a topic of awe in the popular press and became a savvy talking point. But beyond the conventional wisdom that is taking shape, market research experts who have long practiced data-collection and big data analytics -- if on a smaller scale -- are questioning if this will be the year that the ‘firehose of data’ directly impacts their field. Even big data healthcare companies are wrestling with the implications of utilizing the vast amounts of information available to them. 

Everybody likes to talk about the weather. It’s a fair bet that commenting on it and speculating about it account for a fairly significant percentage of the world’s conversations on any given day. There is an oft-quoted saying (attributed to many different comedians and broadcasters) that if you have no other information, no research, you can fairly accurately predict the weather tomorrow by simply saying that it will be substantially similar to the weather today. And you know what? You’ll be right a lot.

In a continuing effort to hone our quantitative market research analysis skills and lend our methodological expertise to some of the most pressing questions of our time, the analysts at MarketResearch.com offer an occasional post on quantitative research challenges.

Today’s challenge, literally under the heading of “Navel Gazing,” is to determine as accurately as possible the amount of belly-button lint produced daily in the United States.