The aim of market research should be to provide data to help solve marketing problems. This applies equally to industrial as well as consumer market research. Accepting this premise, the main task of market research, then, is to deal with commercial problems. In the consumer research field, to talk about interviewers in general can be dangerous. The interviewer who is perfectly capable of carrying out interviews for an omnibus survey is not necessarily able to conduct depth interviews. The ability of an interviewer is thus determined by the level of interview required.
This paper discusses the use of telephone interviewing in industrial research. In describes the advantages and disadvantages with appropriate examples. It is concluded that the main uses of telephone interviewing are either as a preliminary part of a wider research project or in certain types of fact gathering, and attitude and opinion studies, which require a short interview with easily defined respondents using an uncontentious questionnaire.
There are a number of ways in which the telephone can be used to help the industrial market researcher. Some of course fall outside the definition of the word interview. I would like to include the following as standard interview types; A) The structured or semi-structured telephone interview aimed at collecting straight-forward quantitative and qualitative data on a large scale; B) Open-ended telephone interviews on technical or semi-technical subjects; C) Screening interviews designed to enable a selection of people or companies to be interviewed personally; D) Open-ended telephone interviews for general information on the market.
This paper presents data from two surveys conducted in the Spring and the Autumn of 1972 plus three case histories. The Spring Survey studies the role of sampling in industrial market research in the U.K. as employed by the manufacturing and service industries themselves. The Autumn survey supplemented- the Spring survey and confined itself to re-contacting some of the earlier respondents to assess the size of their industrial market research budgets, the use of their industrial market research budgets, the use of market research companies and consultants and the sampling frames known to have been' used by the market research companies and consultants on behalf of the market researchers in industry. The paper finishes with three case histories. The first case history deals with a study of the micrographics market using a sample of industrial and commercial establishments drawn from local taxation lists. The second case history concerns itself with a sample of small businesses-drawn-from the Yellow Pages unduplicated lists. And the third, and final, case history covers minority sampling in agriculture employing the mailing list of a farming journal.
The fundamental requirements for the creation of a field force for interviewing in mass industrial markets are supplied by any large reputable consumer field force. Additional criteria may be little more than to place great emphasis in the selection process on the quality of manner covering: Empathy; -Intelligence; - Presentability. The use of a consumer force for industrial interviewing requires the agency to lay particular stress on three areas: -Selection of the Interviewer; - Training; - Control.
This paper attempts to provide an answer to these questions, on the basis of more than ten years experience of industrial surveys directed to a very varied range of assignments by an international firm of consultants . The true problem underlying these questions is that of how to choose the most suitable interviewer for a given industrial survey task; consequently, the first part of the paper tries to draw up an inventory of typical industrial surveys and is followed by an attempt to demonstrate, by reference to that inventory, the ideal or acceptable interviewer profiles corresponding to each case.
The point of this paper is that based on the experience hitherto gained, the problems concerning representativeness in market research for investment goods should be studied more closely, and that stimuli should be provided for the improvement of the statistical basic data as well as for the further methodical development of industrial market research. Finally it should be born in mind that the industrial market research has by far not reached its point of culmination and that, to the author's conviction, it has ample possibilities for a bright future.
The general sense of the group was that the possible topics for discussion were extremely wide ranging since the industrial market for Market Research was being defined as the non-domestic, or mass commercial market. In this context, many topics discussed were relevant to only a limited part of this wide market and care had to be taken therefore that discussions were as specific as possible .