Hi all,
Having shed my previous job as a survey statistician for the government last to become a market reseracher in the private sector (strangely correlatign with my drop in postings on this site :( ), I've been thinking about what I'd love to do as a market researcher.
For example, I'd love to run a mass survey, including a range of quetsions of recent boardgame behaviour, but more more importantly a large range of attitudinal questions (which could be related to reasons why people play or don't play games) and the type of games they like. Then I'd include some questions on their overall interest in boardgames and how often they play.
The attitudinal questions would be grouped using factor analysis to create 'common themes' of attitudes such as
- like social interaction
- like outdoors activities
- like puzzles
- like to be creative
- like to learn about history ... and so on.
Then, I'd regress the factors against my overall measures, to derive the relative importance of each factor with respect to the overall measure.
Do the relative importances vary for different subpopulations (male vs female, gamer vs occassional gamer vs non-gamer, etc.)? Could we do a market segmentation to support the relative importance measures?
Not like this is likely to happen, but it I sure would like to do it ... oh well ...
Thanks for the reply Braincog (and yes, I know about 6 Sigma :) ),
I was thinking that it would be possible to list a range of games and ask people whether:
- they had heard of the game
- they had played the game
- they enjoyed the game (and would like to play it again)
- they own the game
These variables could easier be individually regressed against a range of attitudinal factors, potentially including types of game characteristics (for a subpopulation which would be familar with terms - reactions to area control games, levels of randomness, trading, preferred game lengths, preferred numbers of players, trading, etc.) or not.
If compared against a market segmentation, this would also extend to understanding the demographics of different types of gamers so marketingstrategies could be targeted if required. It woud also be possible to match against segments for media profiles f you wnated to target advertising and the like.
Of course, this is more what would like to do, and most companies may not think there is sufficient money in it to justify ... In real life, my analysis more focuses on (for example) business attitudes to govenrment services and the like ... and they are willing to pay for that ...