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Ernest Baskin

Ernest Baskin

Department Chair and Associate Professor of Food Marketing, Saint Joseph's University · Academia

Topics Ernest shaped

AI & technology, Researcher craft & identity, Insights function & business, Methods, methodology & rigor, Consumer behavior & culture, Industry, profession & meta

Episodes

What Ernest said — indexed claims

  • AI can draft a starter questionnaire but tends to generic output without specific prompting, and it does not yet detect bias in the questions it generates — including order effects (asking how healthy fries are before asking how much you like them inflates the healthiness weight on liking) — so survey-design training is still required. — Ep. 48 · 15:40 · cl-ernest-baskin-010
  • Companies should preregister their hypotheses and analysis methods before data collection, and on large secondary datasets they should split the data in half — mining one half and validating the conclusion on the other — to keep findings honest. — Ep. 48 · 00:01 · cl-ernest-baskin-001
  • Asking a colleague to review a survey is how jargon survives; the right pretest is outside the company — a parent, a grandparent, a regular customer — and watching them take the survey while they report what words mean and which questions confuse them is how surveys actually get sharper. — Ep. 48 · 36:00 · cl-ernest-baskin-023
  • Skipping market research means not listening to the customer your product is for; on a pure dollars-and-cents basis, the cost of a product launch failure is always multiple times higher than the cost of the research that would have prevented it. — Ep. 48 · 34:40 · cl-ernest-baskin-022
  • Market research can be powerful, but power comes from honoring the entire process — including qualitative signals from vocal outliers — rather than letting quantitative aggregates wash dissent out into noise; New Coke is the canonical case where qual flagged the backlash and was sidelined. — Ep. 48 · 05:05 · cl-ernest-baskin-002
  • Market research can be done cheaply and in a single day on cheap survey-and-panel platforms — as long as you keep the expertise in-house and don't offload it to a consultant; the expertise, not the platform, is the load-bearing input. — Ep. 48 · 12:10 · cl-ernest-baskin-008
  • Industry should adopt academia's preregistration discipline: write hypotheses and analysis methods (including outlier-removal thresholds) before looking at the data, so the analyst cannot inadvertently choose the rule that best confirms the hypothesis post hoc. — Ep. 48 · 30:30 · cl-ernest-baskin-019
  • Adding a map of the vaccination location to a flu-shot reminder email — sent to Yale students and faculty who already knew exactly where the campus health system was — raised participation by a large margin, demonstrating that small environmental cues can outperform direct persuasion. — Ep. 48 · 22:15 · cl-ernest-baskin-014
  • In Google's microkitchens, moving snacks roughly six feet farther from the soda and coffee station significantly reduced incidental snack-grabbing among employees who came for a drink — a small environmental change with measurable effect on eating behavior. — Ep. 48 · 23:50 · cl-ernest-baskin-015
  • The criticism that primary research is slow, expensive, and overly academic is unfair today and was unfair ten years ago; it persists because companies have externalized research to consultants who normalized $20K–$30K price tags, which then crowds out the realization that another way exists. — Ep. 48 · 10:32 · cl-ernest-baskin-007

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