For some, evolution, or âchange,â represents a wonderful opportunity; for many others, it poses a grave challenge to the accepted norm; but for all of us, such change is now an undeniable and omnipresent element of daily life. As developments in technology, travel, media and communication enable us to bring the world closer together, faster, more regularly and more frequently, âchangeâ â ironically â becomes the constant, common denominator of life that we need to celebrate more.
This paper, drawing on both historical analysis of various aspects of the market research industry, together with original global research, addresses the issue of whether the market research industry will continue to follow our historic pattern of steady evolution, or indeed whether we are at the gateway to dramatic change for our industry.
Introduction to the ESOMAR monograph vol.6: "Market Research And Information Technology: Application And Innovation".
This paper describes progress to date on a Government supported programme to evaluate the potential applications of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to market and survey research. The paper reviews the growth of telephone research in Europe in recent years and goes on to discuss how technology might be used to reduce costs with- out reducing quality. ASR is briefly described and its potential for self-completion discussed. The paper progresses to describing the manner in which an original large scale and representative English speech database has been built up for use in sub- word modelling. The body of the paper discusses the new and challenging issues of conducting "interviewerless" telephone interviews. The ways in which software is re- quired to replace the implicit skills of interviewers are outlined and examples given of how these have been tested in the field by replicating an existing continuous customer quality service.
This paper is about Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) and in particular looks at one technology - the pen computer - and its application and use in the largest market research company in the United Kingdom. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the use of CAPI in market research, to discuss the benefits and potential drawbacks of CAPI and to highlight the key-stages of implementing such a system in a major research organisation. Some comparisons are given from a series of parallel runs of paper and PEN CAPI based surveys. It concludes by looking at some of the issues that the growth of CAPI will bring over the next few years.
This paper describes progress to date on a government supported programme to evaluate the potential applications of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to market and survey research. The paper reviews the growth of telephone research in Europe in recent years and goes on to discuss how technology might be used to reduce costs without reducing quality. ASR is briefly described and its potential for self-completion discussed. The paper progresses to describing the manner in which an original large scale and representative English speech database has been built up for use in sub-word modelling. The body of the paper discusses the new and challenging issues of conducting interviewerless telephone interviews. The ways in which software is required to replace the implicit skills of interviewers are outlined and examples given of how these have been tested in the field by replicating an existing continuous customer quality service. Results from the field test are given and an outline of the second field test which will be reported at the Conference. The paper ends by concluding that ASR could be used in market research by interviewers or respondent panels. The extent to which ASR is used will depend very much on whether software tools can be developed which will enable dialogues to be written quickly by researchers rather than speech engineers. This will take time and considerable investment. The result could be a multi-lingual technique capable of interviewing the world from a single site.
The shape of the future of European market measurement research services is in the process of appraisal and change. Not least, this is because of the potential impact of technology driven services, originating in the U.S.A. Such services superficially appear to undermine the role of traditional market measurement services, be they either consumer panels or retail audits. By tracing the evolution of the dominant market measurement in GB, the causes and changes in the marketing environment, and the interface of this with the fundamental data model of market measurement, the paper explores the role of consumer panel techniques historically and in the future. In particular the paper demonstrates the potential of how consumer panels can be used to meet changing information needs, with little change to basic data and methodology. The paper draws on recent GB experience to identify applications across the specific range of marketing requirements that exist now, and will grow in the 1990's.
This paper discusses current and future developments in the ways pre-classification can be used. The paper particularly examines the use of small area statistics linked to other data bases. A suggestion is also made as to how pre- classification can be used, to optimally stratify and allocate samples, when the estimation of more than one variable is considered.