It’s Halloween time, so I thought I’d turn the spotlight on something appropriate for the season. I was recently in my hometown, with my family, for a funeral. It was with mixed emotions that I returned. It was a sad event, but at the same time, I had seen it coming for several years. In general, the whole trip had a kind of macabre feeling. When my wife and I return “home” to my children, they enjoy seeing where we lived, hung out, ran, played, and hung out. The terrible reason for our visit featured a curiously strange conversation and surreal experience.

Three of my four children are teenagers. One of her favorite things to do is watch scary movies, scare her friends (girl/boy) and freak out. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s because they like to snuggle with their friends, jump around, hold on, scream, comfort each other, hold on some more, and snuggle some more. It all seems like a good socially acceptable excuse to touch each other innocently (or not so innocently). They really seem to be in a hurry to scare themselves and their friends.

Like many cities, my hometown has haunted places (or rumored to be haunted places). In the course of the conversation with my children, and their question of what we would do to “have fun” when we went out at night, the topic centered on the places frequented by the city. My hometown was settled by pioneers, trappers, and miners. There is a fairly long history of agriculture, cold windy winters and social isolation. Scary things have happened in its history resulting in many ghost stories, often proven by adventurous teens and sometimes even confirmed. It was around 11:00 pm when we arrived in the city. We decided to take a tour of the haunted city. I’m sure you can see how the funeral correlated. Here are a couple of “stories” that we show my kids.

There is a vacant lot, overgrown with weeds, in my hometown. Legend has it that there was once a house on the vacant lot, inhabited by a family with young children. In a fit of rage one winter night, the father of the family killed his children and his wife, hanging them from trees in the yard, and then killed himself out of guilt. The family home burned to the ground some time later and was never rebuilt. Now, nothing is built on the lot. The lot is fenced in and hard to find, hidden by an undergrowth of trees. There is no electricity or water in the vacant lot. However, many local residents have reported hearing the sound of running water and seeing lights as if the house is there and the rooms are illuminated. Sometimes, very late at night, you can hear the children playing in the yard, but you can’t see them if you look over the fence.

This is quite a local legend. The vacant lot is extremely creepy and hard to find. I jumped the high fence when I was a teenager. It was very scary and the lot was overgrown and not navigable. However, I did not see children, lights or ghosts. When we visited the site, I let my teens get close to the fence, but I wouldn’t let them jump the fence…it’s probably some guys’ unmaintained backyard.

Of the many haunted sites we toured that night, one other is worth mentioning. In the oldest cemetery in the city there is a tomb that was erected in the 19th century by the family of a wealthy local man. The cemetery is quite large, overgrown and somewhat maintained by a curator who lives in the cemetery and spends his afternoons chasing off intruders late at night. The scariest part of this cemetery is this grave. If you sneak up on the tomb, go around it three times, and knock on the tomb door, the tomb hits you back. I’ve done this before… and the tomb caved in (no kidding). It seemed that some ghost, some crazy spirit in the night, was trying to get out of his cold and dark grave. Late at night, my family, along with my daughter’s best friend, snuck into the cemetery (am I not a great dad?). It was dark and cold, lightly raining, and did I mention dark? It was completely dark, as it usually is in cemeteries. From the road, we sneak to the tomb. I think I was probably more afraid of being caught by the curator (or the police) than of the cemetery itself. My children and their friends were really scared by the experience of speaking in a low, calm and nervous voice. They walked slowly to the tomb, circled it three times, as anxiety slowly increased, and knocked on the door of the tomb… and… nothing happened. He didn’t back down. I swear it has touched me before, and my wife has experienced it too. It was a bit disappointing (they probably fixed the hit to avoid a million teenagers in the graveyard late at night), but my kids were still so scared by the cold, dark graveyard that they ran back to the car and took off in a rush. of the engine and a chipped tire in the dirt. There is something funny about scaring yourself.

On a funnier note, in this very graveyard, there used to be two guys buried next to each other. One had the surname Wear and the other the surname Wolff. You can imagine the legends associated with the graveyard werewolf. Mr. Wolff has since been relocated…no kidding.

We just went through one of the scariest times I’ve ever seen in the economy. Radio commercials report that “the recession is over.” That’s great, how do you feel about this pronouncement? Do you think so or are you still worried? In your business, what scares you? What keeps you awake at night?

• product failure
• Leading a company slowly fading into irrelevance (all you buggy whip makers).
• keep good employees
• holding on to customers
• relapse into recession
• Regulations or changes in the economy or government that make your business too difficult to manage or squeeze potential profits.

Market research is not the savior of everything related to business… but it helps…significantly. It can help you identify and address your business needs and answer your business questions. It can help you avoid, improve, UNDERSTAND and succeed in the scary things that plague your business. Among many things market research can do, it can help you:

• Understand your customers’ feelings, wants, needs, desires, opinions, and behaviors, and more importantly, how to hold on to them.
• Understand if your new project has a chance of succeeding and how to make it successful or if you are about to spend a lot of time and money, only to find out that there is no market.
• Understand if your brand, your advertising, your logo, your name, your product, resonates with your customers and says what you want it to say.
• Understand where your industry is headed, where technology is headed, where your… insert your niche…
• Understand how to keep your customers, your employees, your constituents engaged with your product, your company, your social institution.
• Understand… The list can go on and on and on…

In the ’70s I learned something very important… from “Schoolhouse Rock”. Knowledge is power. Isn’t there a better reason to do market research and understand your business than that?

There are plenty of market researchers available to you, and we know what we’re doing. Whether the best research route is through focus groups, online bulletin boards, social media, eye tracking, mystery shopping, mobile research, face-to-face research, online or phone surveys, taste tests, online interviews, depth, ethnographies, etc. We know research methods of almost any subject, type of product, client, patient, constitution or business. And if we don’t know, we’ll find a way to provide you with the market research you need to improve and develop your products and services, understand the economic landscape, and take the worry out of it…the scare…dare I say… .the horror…of managing and running your business.