Geodemographic marketing: mass vs. target markets

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Geodemographic marketing: mass vs. target markets

Post by BuzzerZen »

Stat74 wrote:Keep in mind we are talking about the very top teams in the nation. NAQT is marketing to several thousand.
I think that's exactly the issue right there. As long as HSNCT is one of the "two legitimate national tournaments," and in fact the only national tournament that vast numbers of newly-minted teams will ever hear about, they have no incentive to tailor their regular season product to higher-powered regions/events/schools. They figure that the best teams in the mid-Atlantic will attend NAQT tournaments no matter what because they want to qualify for HSNCT, so they can get away with some egregious question writing (from the perspective of playoff qualifiers at Princeton/TJ/&c) in IS sets. This can't go on indefinitely, of course--at some point the skill level of the really good teams will be such that they absolutely cannot stand NAQT, and so they won't go to NAQT tournaments anymore, and thus not to HSNCT, thus depriving it of its claim to determining a true national champion. I think that is reasonably unlikely to occur, but it is conceivable. Any economics people out there who can apply fancy economics words to this?
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Post by First Chairman »

I'm not an economics major, but it is a question of competition and moving to the next higher level. All of our schools are not the same: we have gone to a mode of enriching some of our school environments to enhance learning. GMU/TJ just co-hosted the national conference for math, science, and technology magnet schools this weekend, and it would be ridiculous to believe that this group of schools is representative of all schools across the country. However, this group of schools do have specific needs that their students' educations have to address.

Educational control is local, and so are the differing expectations of the administration at each of those schools. While we would love there to be some standards of quiz bowl difficulty, we can't even get through a national curriculum without polarizing the political debate. Sorry, I am not writing Intelligent Design questions. But laugh if you want, there is a place for Arkansas Beef Bowl.

The best way to address it is what we have now: create more suppliers of questions. Each supplier has local interaction with the customer base and different standards of play. In terms of getting students and teams interested in the game, that's probably the best way of doing it. And I think there is a noble cause in trying to get those teams to play in a national competitive setting.

But the novice golf player can't play at Augusta National or in the British (golf) open. The newly competitive tennis player can't play at Wimbledon. There is some point where one must reach some sort of quality of play, perhaps in a regulated form. We're not there yet as I doubt that any of the current suppliers of questions wants to lose their share of the money pie.

Of course, what Evan writes has happened already: see Chip's tournaments with the defections that resulted in the ASCN tournament and then the PACE/NAQT tournaments. Chip's events are a shell of what they were. The good teams will dictate "respectable" events and seek the challenges they want. That's simpler supply and demand, and it is always conceivable that it could happen again.
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Post by TheCzarMan »

I have to say, I'm not entirely for it. I know for a lot of the better teams who practice a lot, the questions are very basic and you are looking for something more. But is it worth alienating the many more HS teams across the country who cannot practice and work as much towards Academic Team as you can? In my opinion, NAQT should find a way to differentiate levels of play between teams.
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

TheCzarMan wrote:I have to say, I'm not entirely for it. I know for a lot of the better teams who practice a lot, the questions are very basic and you are looking for something more. But is it worth alienating the many more HS teams across the country who cannot practice and work as much towards Academic Team as you can? In my opinion, NAQT should find a way to differentiate levels of play between teams.
I think what is being advocated here is more like "it would be beneficial for NAQT to produce 2 or 3 sets a year that are harder then IS sets so that tournaments that have really really good teams could use them more appropriately." I think everyone can agree that if NAQT were to replace all their current production with stuff that only caters to the top 20 teams in the country that would be a very very bad move, but I think it could be useful for them to try a couple of those types of sets for tournaments like TJ or Princeton and see what happens.
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Post by pray for elves »

In other words, you think that NAQT should make more sets like the college SCT level?
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

That's one possibility, although I'm not a giant fan of some of the SCT sets. Are you meaning division 1 or 2? I think 2 would be better.
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Post by The Atom Strikes! »

Perhaps some HS tournaments could be played on NAQT's lower-tier college sets? This wouldn't require NAQT to produce another level, and still provide competition for the tougher teams. Perhaps also these tournaments could allow teams to qualify for Nationals, because, despite the many gripes about various questions, I think that HSNCT remains a reasonable test of teams' ability.
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

The problem is that NAQT only makes 1 somewhat "lower level" college set, and that is the Division 2 sectional, which last year was actually partially pulled out of an IS-set. All the other NAQT college tournaments are either ICT an SCT questions that are, at this point, inappropriate for high school, or else they are just IS sets that happened to be played at college tournaments, which is a highly criticized practice. Part of the reason people want a few tournaments beyond IS sets is so that competitive high schools can play them, but also so that colleges will stop using IS sets that are too easy for their tournaments.
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Post by pray for elves »

Deesy Does It wrote:That's one possibility, although I'm not a giant fan of some of the SCT sets. Are you meaning division 1 or 2? I think 2 would be better.
Div. 2, since Div. 1 Collegiate SCT is supposed to be the same difficulty as HSNCT, according to the "difficulty ratings" posted long ago by Steve Watchorn (who does not speak for NAQT, but has contributed questions).
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Post by DumbJaques »

Well, I saw some of these questions and I am certainly of the opinion that they are laughably bad. In fact, I will object to them on grounds that have nothing to do with length or difficulty of answer selection, which in my opinion are really the only things you can complain about in terms of what alienates newer/mediocre teams.

These questions are poorly written. Powers are placed poorly, but that's really just an extension of the questions have basically no good early clues. We're talking clues on literary works that don't even mention characters or plots until FTP. We're talking geography clues that have leadins that are really just poorly-constructed, extended puns on related objects. Questions that (I'm literally not joking) start out by giving an author's best known work AND THEN DESCRIBING IT FOR TWO LINES DESPITE HAVING GIVEN THE TITLE. These are question writing basics that just aren't adhered to. We're not talking the classic complaints of some tired college players who have declared that they will never like NAQT. The only reason I've even been exposed to these questions is because of the *numerous* complaints I've received from hs players. And these players weren't all on the championship (or even playoff) teams.

It's not just about easy answers. Easy answers are just fine, and indeed, some of these trash and current events questions are laughably hard to get. Really, NAQT seems to have been just as bad at answer selection with these sets, going beyond the standard over-representation of current events, geography, sports, awful "pop culture," general knowledge, and things that are just baffling to have tossups on. As everyone else, I do wish we could discuss specifics, but things are about equivalent to having a tossup on the Maltese Falcon that establishes it's a statue named for a place in the first line for some of these literature questions. Not to mention there are some randomly really hard questions, questions that most people wouldn't really include in a high school set as tossups.

It's not about length, because length is largely independent of terrible clue selection and entirely independent of terrible answer selection. Also, a good number of questions spend 1-2 lines rambling on giving information that tries to make some dumb joke or doesn't point to anything or basically restates a bad "figure it out" clue 2-3 times over. Maybe if NAQT would knock this off, they could have more clue-rich tossups on appropriate academic things.

Frankly I always felt like IS sets about 3-4 years ago were a bit too easy for the big mid-Atlantic tournaments but it was never a problem. It clearly is now, and since it's clearly not just a "too short/answers too limited" issue, it really is a serious quality issue, I feel entirely comfortable putting the blame squarely on NAQT and not on the "differing environments they must appeal to."

As for the A-B-C thing, I guess I'd support making 1 or 2 IS sets harder (well, obviously I'd support making them all a bit harder and a lot better, but let's assume the IS this year isn't bad). I don't see the need really to have easy IS, when you have ample A series questions. Are places that "aren't ready" for basic IS really going to demand 5 tournaments of A questions? If they do, they'll be ready for IS by the third or fourth one.

One thing I would (really) like an explanation from NAQT about is these (possible) plans to write a THIRD ICT set, this one just for community college teams. The many reasons that's ludicrous aside, how can NAQT possibly miss where the biggest problems with their sets lie and randomly address a problem that doesn't exist at all. Of course, I'm not holding my breath. The fact is that NAQT IS isn't going to cut it for about the top 50 teams (50 is a big number, a lot bigger than 10-20, which would in my opinion still be an issue). Unless NAQT announces some big plan to improve the quality of the later sets, I doubt DACQ could justify using these sets for Weekend of Quizbowl given the teams that will be there. I will not ask these teams to make up to a four day commitment with travel, set up a schedule that lets them get tons of games against teams they won't see any other time but nationals, and then have them play the games on bad questions. That NAQT has not produced a set that could even be passably appropriate for a big tournament like this (that is, if there's ever a tournament that gets 15+ of the top teams in the country together, IS is pretty much not appropriate at all) is a huge, huge problem, one to which I wish NAQT would respond.
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Post by First Chairman »

There is a point of diminishing returns for producing so many sets. I doubt there is enough manpower to do that. Again, I haven't been exposed to NAQT sets over the last few years, so I don't know exactly what problems everyone has claimed about their sets. What I do surmise is that apparently the learning curve for quiz bowl has gone faster for some teams compared to others, and that NAQT's one-size-fits-all difficulty model is going to have problems.
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Post by The Atom Strikes! »

I agree with Chris's points about the terrible early clues that didn't have much actual information, though I don't share his hatred of Trash and Current Events questions. I also noticed that this set was considerably worse than the set used at TJIAT, which was only a little subpar for NAQT sets. It seems to me that there was probably something wrong with the editing of this particular set, rather than a general degeneration of NAQT's questions. Would someone from NAQT (like R), care to explain?
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Post by First Chairman »

I suppose my other question is this: with the proliferation of all these other sets that have differing levels of rigor, do ALL NAQT tournament winners qualify for NAQT events? Shouldn't it just be the highest-rigor sets that do it? What other incentive would there be for teams or tournament directors to move off the A or B sets to harder sets of questions?
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Post by DumbJaques »

hatred of Trash and Current Events questions
To be clear I don't have a hatred of CE or Trash, and I'm unclear how you got that from my statement. Those subjects are definitely overrepresented in what should be an academic set focused on a wide array of subjects. I think current events are very important and deserve to be asked about somewhere in the 1/1 neighborhood, and I think trash deserves 1/1. They tend to get more than that in NAQT, which combined with the geography and general knowledge stuff really shifts the distribution and can affect games heavily. I mean, personally, geography and current events are good subjects for me and I like playing on those questions, so it's not any personal vendetta I have against those questions. In any case that's something more of a historic NAQT preference and less pertinent to the current problems.
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Post by The Atom Strikes! »

I understand your point better now. I extrapolated hatred from the way that you tend to be one of the first to complain about the Trash or Current Events in a tournamet, but I now realize that hatred is not your position. However, I think that Trash wouldn't affect the outcome of games as much if NAQT stuck to a specific per-match question distribution (which, as Trash's percentage is a non-integer, would reduce its levels); and I also wonder why you think that Current Events and Geography are not academic.
Nevertheless, these are rather petty points, and distract from the more important issue: NAQT dropping the ball on question quality at this tournament.
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

FYI Henry, I don't think that Chris says geography is academic. Actually, he's said that college geography is probably too underrepresented before, but the reason it is underrepresented is as a reaction to NAQT's intense overuse of geography. I mean, they just ask too much and they always have.
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Post by The Atom Strikes! »

I admit that some of my misperceptions are due to being a (relatively) new member of the forum. I was looking through some old threads this afternoon, and saw some things that Chris Ray had said that surprised me (such as defending the use of Trash in academic tournaments). As a relative newcomer, I was not so familiar with his views, and assumed an absolutist, rather than relative stance from him.
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Post by Stained Diviner »

I think the two best things that can come of this discussion are:
1) Some of the elite high school teams should discuss which college sets would be good to compete on, because though I generally support the use of IS sets, there are better questions for matches between elite high school teams. I think NAQT implicitly admits as much when they use more difficult questions for HSNCT. My team practiced on NAQT college sets last year, and the practices were beneficial for the 5-6 good players on my team. Also, it's no secret that many of the elite high school students and teams continue to improve by practicing on and/or reading college questions. Any tournament in Illinois using college questions would draw a small field, but it would be a great tournament for most of those few teams.

2) It would be good for somebody (or even better for several people) who has seen the set in question to write up a critique and send it to NAQT. NAQT uses a variety of writers, editors, and quality control methods, and they put out a ton of questions each year, so they may need to be told when their product disappoints people who expect better from them. I have found that the overall difficulty of the answer space and power placement can vary a lot from IS Set to IS Set, and every once in a while there is one match in a set that is noticeably harder or easier than the rest.

I won't be there in person, but my team will play on IS 70 this weekend. We'll see what happens.

I'll also add that, in Illinois, the ratio of teams who think IS is too hard to the ones who think it's too easy is more than 10:1.
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

ReinsteinD wrote:I'll also add that, in Illinois, the ratio of teams who think IS is too hard to the ones who think it's too easy is more than 10:1.
yeah, that's one of the big problems that I think a lot of people forget. In Missouri right now there is a grand total of 0 NAQT tournaments being run in the state, and there is a pretty solid block of about 400 teams (like, all but maybe 5 or so) who seem to really dislike or not understand what pyramidality is, and within that group there are a ton of coaches who have said stuff to the effect of "We will never go to an NAQT tournament because they are ridiculously hard and in a bizarre format" (well, actually it's the Missouri format that's bizarre, but that's beside the point). There was once a coach who said that he didn't want pyramidal questions to be used when Shawn Pickrell got the bid because "pyramidal questions are full of lines of worthless clues that nobody knows for lines." Another similar argument I heard was when a player who is supposed to be good said that he hated Chris Ray's ACE camp questions because "they were basically 9 lines of stuff that nobody's ever heard of, and then in the last line is something that like everybody knows." I mean, this isn't just a Missouri problem, there are whole swaths of the country with nothing that is known happening. I mean, if we were to suddenly replace these area's quizbowl with IS sets, they would probably revolt because the material, as easy as it really is, is totally unaccessible to them. I mean, if you came and watched the Wash U or Rolla or Truman State tournaments, your mind would be blown at how little these teams know. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that these easy IS sets aren't really going to hurt NAQT, and I think in these awful areas the large number of A-sets could actually be a good idea (although I hope that in 5 years or so they can phase them back out some). While this doesn't take into account the crappy questions that NAQT has perpetrated, I think that NAQT is in a not very good position right now because there are such extremes in the world of quizbowl right now in high school.
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Post by Stat Boy »

Div. 2, since Div. 1 Collegiate SCT is supposed to be the same difficulty as HSNCT
To me, questions on the level of HSNCT prelim rounds seem like a reasonable choice for differentiating between top HS teams in fall tournaments.
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Post by cvdwightw »

A few points, which may or may not be relevant to the discussion:

1. It's not like NAQT finishes the set two months before the first tournament and then has the luxury of taking time to edit questions for two months. They suffer from the same problem every other tournament suffers from, namely, getting people to submit enough questions early enough to do a decent editing job. I'm not saying that all the questions that were bad were a result of that, but it's likely some were.

2. Dr. Chuck is right in that some areas of the country are hitting a learning curve faster than other areas. Now, this isn't to say that these areas can't bring themselves up to where NAQT is right now -- for example, the San Diego area is poised to become a dominant force in the region despite only really one or two teams having played outside their leagues for more than a few years. Still, it's tough for a lot of areas to make the transition. On the other hand, you've got areas like the mid-Atlantic that have already "evolved" past the NAQT stage; several schools find IS sets "too easy". There's a trade-off here between spreading good quizbowl and satisfying the top 1% of teams. I don't think both goals are simultaneously achievable, and even if some schools think NAQT isn't good quizbowl anymore, it's a heck of a lot closer to good quizbowl than what a significant portion of quizbowl-playing schools have seen.

3. Until a new organization comes along that can produce quality high school invitational sets on a national level, NAQT is the best and arguably only way to compare teams from different regions, especially circuits that rarely if ever intermingle.
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Post by Sir Thopas »

ReinsteinD wrote:2) It would be good for somebody (or even better for several people) who has seen the set in question to write up a critique and send it to NAQT.
I was planning to do this, but other people can add to my laundry list when I'm done with it.
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Post by Tegan »

ReinsteinD wrote: I'll also add that, in Illinois, the ratio of teams who think IS is too hard to the ones who think it's too easy is more than 10:1.
I don't think I would agree with that ..... I think hte issues in Illinois are:

1. 10:1 think the questions are too long if they are longer than two lines in 14 point font. I think even our most mediochre teams (and I suspect there will be a lot of them in Illinois this year) would get 80-85% of NAQT questions on the giveaway. Of course, that's nothing to brag about.

2. Historically, Illinois centers its team concept around math and history being major categories and sociology, business, and psychology being minor categories. This does not fit well with NAQT's concept of distribution. It isn't that the questions are too hard ..... its that there is a disconnect between what NAQT and some states deem as "standard", and what Illinois deems "standard".
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Post by First Chairman »

Dwight's points are very well taken by me. I do think a national set of common questions is useful because otherwise we'd be relying on Great Auk to do comparisons. And that's just not right. :razz: But NAQT should continue to expand the market for teams to compete in quiz bowl events and run their national championship event. But if teams reach a certain level of desire to go to the "next level," they have that opportunity with PACE too.

Theoretically PACE had wanted to work in the beginning was that we would provide the link between college and high school programs to provide those upper-level high school question events. Ideally the college programs would be writing those sets of questions for the teams that want to be in the upper 20%ile. We also recognized there were certain events during the year that clearly attracted the best teams in a particular region, now nationally, short of national championship events, and we wanted to recognize and network those events. We haven't gone to a "grand prix" format, and ... heck, we are talking high school kids here (and some of us have jobs). But events such as the one I and Chris are doing in March are among the things that we at PACE have been trying to promote. It won't be easy, but it's the best we can do.
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Post by First Chairman »

To respond to Charlie's notes about pyramidal questions... pyramidal questions are not the only way to play quiz bowl (cf. Brainiac by :kenj:) . Indeed, Jeopardy and radio trivia shows do well without pyramidality. As a somewhat democratic organization, they do have the right to dictate their own way of playing the game as they want. That's just the nature of things.

As I enter the phase of the year when I run High School Celebrity Shoot, I realize, I deliberately break pyramidality rules in many occasions, but I'll intersperse them in for "higher value" points. But the whole tournament is not full of these questions. (Now granted, I also take away the buzzer in HSCS format too, so they must be able to focus on the longer questions anyway.)

Charlie, I should try to send you guys a set from HSCS for you all to try on the Missouri crowd to see what they think.
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Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

While unfortuantely that is not very feasible for us to do this year, I think it could be pretty interesting to try. Also, I should note that right now we are looking into doing an A-set tournament for local teams to see both how the stats trun out and how people react, along with getting a qualifier for NAQT out there since there isn't one in MO right now. I should say that this is tentative, but we are pretty on board with it as long as the building is free, so we'll see how this goes for local teams.
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Re: Geodemographic marketing: mass vs. target markets

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

BuzzerZen wrote:
Stat74 wrote:Keep in mind we are talking about the very top teams in the nation. NAQT is marketing to several thousand.
I think that's exactly the issue right there. As long as HSNCT is one of the "two legitimate national tournaments," and in fact the only national tournament that vast numbers of newly-minted teams will ever hear about, they have no incentive to tailor their regular season product to higher-powered regions/events/schools. They figure that the best teams in the mid-Atlantic will attend NAQT tournaments no matter what because they want to qualify for HSNCT, so they can get away with some egregious question writing (from the perspective of playoff qualifiers at Princeton/TJ/&c) in IS sets. This can't go on indefinitely, of course--at some point the skill level of the really good teams will be such that they absolutely cannot stand NAQT, and so they won't go to NAQT tournaments anymore, and thus not to HSNCT, thus depriving it of its claim to determining a true national champion. I think that is reasonably unlikely to occur, but it is conceivable. Any economics people out there who can apply fancy economics words to this?
I've been kind of milling over this since you posted it, and I think this is a legitimate concern for NAQT. The problem, though, is that I think we can mostly agree that the HSNCT is a legitimate national championship, and that as long as that remains true, their will always be interest from any of the best teams. The concern comes in when the problems in IS sets keep bleeding more and more into the HSNCT, and if the nationals set does in fact become too easy for the top teams in the nation. However, I have looked at past HSNCT sets and I think there is a really good improvement in general from, like, 2000 until last year, with better bonuses and more pyramidal tossups. I think that NAQT should/will keep evolving this particular set of theirs, since it should be the tournament that caters most to the top teams of anything NAQT does. I think something that would solve the problem NAQT has of regions where IS sets are too hard, OK, or too easy would be to allow non-NAQT tournaments to affiliate with NAQT a la PACE. The problem with that, of course, is that NAQT is a business and such, but I don't think it would do any detriment to their national championship. I mean, that way areas that are still in the level of NAQT sets would be able to use their tournaments to qualify, and the teams that are "too good" for IS sets would instead be able to attend harder tournaments like Gonzaga, TJ-Winter, Gov, etc. and qualify using more skill-appropriate means. Also, the added benefit would be the tournaments with weaker fields who become NAQT qualifiers could send a couple more teams that might not have qualified otherwise. So while I don't know enough about business to know if it would significantly lower their year-long profits (although it looks like it would) it would most likely make their HSNCT even more financially successful, with the added benefit of making people of all skill levels fairly happy with the qualifying methods. I mean, I've never heard about that method hurting PACE.
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Post by grapesmoker »

Without getting into an extended discussion of NAQT in general, I would just like to point out that it would be unfeasible to produce an IS set that was up to the standards of an HSNCT set. It's not going to happen simply because of the time and effort involved in doing so; if NAQT actually did this, their whole business model (which is based in large part on IS sets) would collapse. On the other hand, the good teams will always win enough games to qualify for HSNCT anyway, and since it's still one of the two best quizbowl nationals in existence, they'll still go. So NAQT really has nothing to gain from producing sets geared toward those schools, since it's not like they're going to not come to HSNCT.
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Re: Geodemographic marketing: mass vs. target markets

Post by STPickrell »

Deesy Does It wrote:I think something that would solve the problem NAQT has of regions where IS sets are too hard, OK, or too easy would be to allow non-NAQT tournaments to affiliate with NAQT a la PACE.


Interesting factoid from NAQT's website:
http://naqt.com/hsnct/qualification.html
"4. Winning any class or division of an official state championship with rules and questions similar to those of NAQT."

I have asked whether VHSL and MSHSAA champions are now eligible for HSNCT but have not yet received a reply. (I'd imagine any championships Academic Initiative writes for might get covered under this policy, if SBCofVA questions are covered.)

I think A-level sets will go over well with teams in Missouri. If they could stomach my questions without recoiling akin to a vampire taking a holy water bath, I think A-level will be OK.
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Post by STPickrell »

grapesmoker wrote:It's not going to happen simply because of the time and effort involved in doing so; if NAQT actually did this, their whole business model (which is based in large part on IS sets) would collapse.
I'm not sure the creation of an "IS-C" set would cause the collapse of their business. Rather, it would be cost-ineffective to do so. If say Michigan, Southern California, Georgia, and Chicagoland advanced to the point where they could effectively play on an IS-C set, it might become effective to do so. But if only the DC/MD/VA circuit would be able to use an IS-C set, then it would be uneconomical.

Perhaps the time has come for a high school version of ACF (this would be waaaay less acrimonious than the college-level creation of ACF) where packet submission is the name of the game.
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Re: Geodemographic marketing: mass vs. target markets

Post by BuzzerZen »

STPickrell wrote:If they could stomach my questions without recoiling akin to a vampire taking a holy water bath, I think A-level will be OK.
This simile was funnier when I thought it mentioned a vampire baby. I can't really say why...
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Post by NoahMinkCHS »

As far as affiliated tournaments goes, I think NAQT won't ever allow non-NAQT regular season tournaments to serve as nationals qualifiers. (State tournaments are OK because NAQT can't always get access to those, and more importantly, what kind of "national championship" would turn down a "state champion" program?) It's not like HSNCT needs any more teams, and it's not like top-tier programs are just going to stop going to IS tournaments (unless NAQT adopted this rule). So why bother? IS questions, despite any faults, still make it easier to host more tournaments in a region, and good teams will still go to those tournaments.

Also, in response to Shawn's wondering whether an IS-C would be cost effective -- I think the top tier of GA/SC/AL, for example, would benefit from introducing IS-C into our tournaments just as Mid-Atlantic teams would. BUT, and I'd be surprised if this didn't apply up there also, most tournaments have a great deal of lower-tier teams that need to enjoy the tournament too. It might be worth producing one or two such sets for the best of the best teams, but then... they already do and it's called HSNCT.

But (listen up, NAQT!) I think if they produced another set (maybe analogous to HSNCT the same way SCT is to ICT) and shopped it around for a late-season tournament, I think at least a few sites would be interested. Hard to say if they could attract enough teams to be worth it, though.
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Post by cvdwightw »

NoahMinkCHS wrote:But (listen up, NAQT!) I think if they produced another set (maybe analogous to HSNCT the same way SCT is to ICT) and shopped it around for a late-season tournament, I think at least a few sites would be interested. Hard to say if they could attract enough teams to be worth it, though.
This could be feasibly done with something like the set used for all NAQT State Championships/State Qualifiers. Since theoretically this should be the "biggest"/"most important" of NAQT's Regular Season sets, it would make sense to tailor that set more to the top teams and less to the bottom teams.
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