In November 1978 a new tabloid newspaper was launched in the Midlands and Northern areas of England. It was positioned directly against existing popular newspapers. Marplan, on behalf of The Sun, monitored its launch in order to predict its sales level and to identify its editorial strengths and weaknesses. This paper describes the sales success achieved by that newspaper: evaluated against its published targets. Most of the paper, however, deals with the level of editorial success achieved: and how this compares with the editorial ratings given to existing popular newspapers. As a bi-product of this study much data of value emerges on the editorial requirements of readers of mass circulation daily newspapers. The paper describes the techniques used - and the results obtained. Finally the paper describes a multivariate approach to classifying people in terms of their requirements from popular newspapers. This approach offers significant opportunities for the accurate identification of "what leads people to read popular newspapers".
This paper will demonstrate that there are some people who do not need as heavy a level of frequency of exposure to television commercials as others. Viewers exposed once or twice can recognise a commercial extract - and name the brand advertised - as well as other people who saw the advertisement many more times. The levels of exposure needed relate to the total amount of commercial television to which the viewer is exposed.
This paper describes how Capital Radio and Marplan worked together to use research to build an audience. From the start Marplan worked alongside the key executives at Capital, discussing, interpreting and making decisions based on the findings. Two types of research were involved - audience measurement and audience ratings of programmes and presenters. Helped by research Capital has developed its programming and presentation and has grown from a low of 5% share of listening three months after going on air to a current share of over 25% - making Capital the largest station in the London area, against the entrenched competition of the BBC.
This paper describes how a set of simulation programmes, grouped under the acronym WANDA, can be used to increase the contribution of sample survey data to forward planning. The problem taken as an example is the construction of a model of voting behaviour and how this could be used by a political party to plan an effective electoral strategy. The WANDA programmes are particularly applicable in the area of persuasion; in the development and testing of 'best' persuasion strategies.
This paper describes an attempt to answer a different question, which can be simply expressed as How do electors decide how to vote?'. It is hoped that the work described below goes some way towards describing the attitude structure underlying voting behaviour. The questions arising are many. Is voting choice a reasonably rational decision? Is it an expression of a personality or attitude dimension? Or is it a function of habit; of how an individual voted before or of how his parents voted? Do the basic reasons for party re-election differ for supporters of different parties? Do Labour voters vote Labour for one reason. Conservative voters Conservative for another and Liberal voters Liberal for a third reason? How do floating voters make their final decision? It is difficult to hypothesise answers without looking at the underlying attitude structure, at the frames of reference wherein people perceive political parties. This paper investigates whether the application of sophisticated factor analytic techniques to relatively simple data can provide indicators of the frames of reference operating in the minds of voters.
This paper has two objects. One of these is to present some examples of research based on the semantic differential technique. The other is to make some general observations about the use of the technique, based on our own experience. The semantic differential has already been quite widely used in market research, but we believe that our use of it in media research has some novelty. At. the same time, we think that our conclusions about the use of the technique may apply in other branches of consumer, and possibly retailer, research. The paper starts with a description of the semantic differential technique. We then present two case studies of the use of the semantic differential in media research. In presenting these case studies we outline the research problems involved, describe briefly the research design, and give some indications of the findings. After this, we discuss methods of analysis and briefly review some technical problems. The paper ends with a summary of our research methods and some concluding remarks.