As of this writing (from my home office, of course), over 5 million people in the United States have contracted the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19. After a period of reopening businesses across the country, climbing case rates have driven many states to begin closing back down again. Almost seven months after the first U.S. case was reported, there are still no clear indicators of when life will return to normal.

Here are 3 things to know about implementing market segmentation.

Other methods have significant but grudgingly accepted flaws; Likert scales, for example, are subject to scale bias because people use scales differently (one person’s 7 might be another person’s 9).  Ordinal rankers, where respondents simply rank their preferences from 1 to k[1] in order of importance, can reliably provide information on which single item is most important, in aggregate, but discrimination between attributes is quickly lost after that.  Further, most survey respondents can rarely make meaningful comparisons between more than a few items. 

Here are 3 things to know.

Here’s our approach to product testing.

Prior to Covid-19, we enjoyed the harmless concept of only 6 degrees of separation from another person.  Specifically, Kevin Bacon.  Interestingly enough, we also called it the “6 Handshake” rule.