Researchers, this Valentine’s do something nice to show respondents you love them
I usually post or tweet this link once a year right before Valentine’s Day because so many people are in the market for a diamond then.
It was a model we built for fun back in 2006. I don’t consider it promotional per se as it’s something we just put out there for free under the creative commons license agreement. It gets a slow steady flow of visitors from around the world, not market researchers, usually just people getting engaged and shopping for that first diamond ring.
I’d love to see more market researchers build free models like this. The idea came when I was in the market for a diamond myself one week and I got frustrated with the lack of intelligent information around selecting one at a fair price. If you think about it, a diamond is far more of a commodity than a car, but there was no Edmunds.com ‘True Market Value’ for a diamond. In fact diamond retailers pray on emotion and the uneducated consumer.
This model was created based on screen scraping data on almost 50,000 diamonds from various online diamond retailers. Our first model predicted selling price for any diamond. Later we decided for various reasons, including a lot of hate mail from diamond retailers, to dumb down the model a bit and make it a comparison only tool. Still I think it can be quite helpful.
Happy Valentine’s Day to you and your loved one!
@TomHCAnderson
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6 responses so far ↓
1 Meta Brown // Feb 11, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Tom,
Why would you like to see more market researchers build modeling tools? Just good karma or is there some business value to market researchers?
2 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 11, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Yes, Good Karma mainly.
Our profession is getting a reputation as spammers on the survey side, and as easy to dupe for a $100 side money making stream on the focus group side.
There are so many opportunities to create some models like this one. We’ve also published a few segmentation typing tools online which the average person would find interesting.
Some Examples:
http://www.andersonanalytics.com/SNStype/tool.php
http://www.andersonanalytics.com/litype/
http://www.andersonanalytics.com/gigiscloset/typingtool.htm
I think if there were more of this type of contribution it would raise the respect of our industry in the general public more than most other things I could think of.
3 Rachel Patterson // Feb 11, 2011 at 3:50 pm
IDK if it is out of your expertise but do you think that you will add more to the tool such as diamond location or if it were bought through fair trade? I am just curious because a lot of people are interested in consuming fair trade, organic, local you name it products (obviously not just diamonds).
On another note, did you ever thought about making a module like this for the specialty food industry? I think people who are in the spice, coffee, wine businesses etc… would go crazy for this stuff since they are looking for the latest highest quality foreign products.
4 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 11, 2011 at 3:58 pm
@Rachel,
There certainly are geographic differences, but they are in large part related to income which is in return related to carat. So average carat in New York approaches is well above 2 whereas in many places in the US it’s well below 1.
Also, as we used online diamonds for input data (though we also had some offline data to compare with), these diamonds can be purchased and shipped anywhere. So to answer your question, I do not believe location is highly relevant. We did take into consideration the “certificate” type to some degree.
5 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 13, 2011 at 10:56 am
If you like we could build a new model just for blood diamonds?
6 Rachel // Feb 25, 2011 at 9:57 am
Tom!
Oh ic. Thanks for the information. There is always so much to learn.
Well a blood diamond model would be interesting and would satisfy my analytical side but that would be up to you if you are interested! =)
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