Kathy Pilhuj, who was senior vice president of data collection at Scarborough Research and a leading innovator in the market research industry, has passed away. She was 61 years old.
Pilhuj's
main responsibility at Scarborough was managing the company's two telephone interviewing centers. She was well known as an innovator, developing a number of industry best practices such as
empirically-proven hiring tests, continuous every call measurement of interviewer performance and an over-arching quality/response rate concept called "best use of sample." She also led the
programming, IT and data collection teams and was responsible for dozens of servers and data lines and hundreds of internal programs necessary to collect and process Scarborough's data.
Pilhuj
was active in a number of industry associations and chaired multiple committees for both the Council for Marketing and Opinion Research (CMOR) and the Market Research Association (MRA). She was
honored by the Market Research Association in June of 2011 with its coveted Award of Excellence for her extensive and long-time work on various boards, committees and task forces.
Pilhuj spent
23 years with Scarborough before being hospitalized since the end of July 2011. She is survived by her husband Gene, their children Nick and Kate, and their grandchildren Ariel and Daniel.