It is particularly difficult to control the quality of the results obtained by the peoplemeter panels. Even though the technical resources to carry out a real control exist, no peoplemeter panel operator has so far used a simple system, known as the 'presence sensor', with the exception of the 'Auditrack' panel set up by the Reach Mass Institute in the Lebanon. This paper describes the advantages of using the presence sensor and provides a preliminary assessment of the measurement errors due to the poor input of the panellists. While waiting for the arrival of passive audience measurement, what is the error scale of declarative audience measurement based on the 'push button' and how is the day-to-day precision going to be improved with full knowledge of the facts?
Brand equity is basically related to the capacity of a brand to win and maintain loyal customers. It represents a new dimension in contemporary marketing that focuses on winning share of loyal customers to improve and preserve market share. Common experience shows that it is not enough for a brand to communicate adequately a superior performance or a more attractive image to win share from the competition. These are key elements in building up brand equity. Yet, there is one more single key element that should be taken into consideration: the kind of channels or contacts that a brand uses to communicate with its customers and prospects. Channels or contacts are not neutral conveyors of content. Rather, they add value - in a positive or negative sense - to what they are communicating. Drawing on theories and experiments in the behavioral sciences, and most importantly on psycho- physics, a tool was developed to measure the value of the contacts. A case study from Yves St. Laurent illustrates how this tool was applied in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The paper highlights the commitment of General Motors to marketing research, not for the sake of doing research but as a tool for making decisions and taking actions on the marketing scene. It shows how research has paid off for General Motors and has lead to base its advertising strategies with Impact-Dubai on sound grounds. It features especially the use of a proprietary technique to BBDO the photosort, in the quest of achieving an appealing imagery to the customer. The technique consists of a validated deck of photos which are submitted to the respondents in the survey. The people express their opinions about brands and how far do they like/dislike them (affinity/rejection scores), using photos rather than words. It shows how this allows to assess in a more reliable way the imagery related to a brand. Words in general fall short of expressing all the nuances of the pictures in our heads a brand might evoke. Add to this that, in a multicultural business environment, words might be a source of miscommunication. Let us take for example the attribute avant-garde. It might evoke things in the mind of the customer that are different of what the creative director might imagine because he happens to belong to another culture. Pictures do not suffer from the same shortcomings. The signs are tangible and do not need an interpretation process. The paper is based on a research on 400 car owners of the middle category and up, and covered Saudi Arabia and UAE. It displays the methodology used to process the data obtained from the photos and how it was put into use by General Motors and Impact-Dubai. It demonstrates specifically the use of such research tools for elaborating an advertising strategy and the kind of guidance it provides in the design of copies, especially in the case of multimodel car company where every care must be taken to reinforce the overall corporate image, while not letting the models cannibalise each other.
The paper demonstrates, according to a step by step procedure, how research relative to a car launch was thought of, in terms of strategic objectives first, then how an approach integrating the qualitative and the quantitative was selected second, as the most adequate one to serve these objectives. Subsequently it shows how these strategic objectives were translated into specific research objectives, and how the qualitative and the quantitative, the first delivering the insight into the market and the latter allowing to weight this insight, were used to build upon each other the necessary knowledge required by the objectives. It demonstrates how- a complex set of data going from data regarding the cultural milieu of the market, to the data specific to the expected benefits from the product and that relative to the positioning of the competition can be integrated in order to find the most promising positioning for the new car. It shows also how, once the copy was designed and implemented, the same data could be used to evaluate if the copy was on strategy and if it was persuasive. The success of the the car launch proves, in a compelling manner, the benefits of using integrated approaches to detect opportunities on a market.
Conducting research in the Arab World faces difficulties and obstacles. Sometimes they are close to those encountered by the practice of research in the Western World. Some other times they are of a quite different nature. This is why adapting and finding new ways or techniques of research is required. But whatever the specificities of the local field the international standards of surveys can still be met, even in the case of such sophisticated tools as cultural patterns monitors or lifestyle measurement procedures. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate this proposition by showing the building up and putting into use of a Lebanese cultural patterns monitor, in spite of all the difficulties stemming from the current situation in the Lebanon.