In 1993 Girobank decided to embark upon a mystery shopper exercise to provide information as input to its Total Quality management system. Girobank had already undertaken regular monitoring of its customer service through continuous customer surveys for several years, however, it was felt that these were not providing the complete picture that was required. In particular there was the need for an exercise that was essentially objective in nature and did not rely on the subjective perception of customers of a service that was distanced from them at the time of completing a survey. In addition mystery shopping would allow specific service aspects to be measured at key points in time. It would not be reliant upon individual customers' usage of service and the vagaries of human behaviour. Girobank's method of operation as a centralised bank with an agency relationship through the Post Office precluded any participation in syndicated mystery shopping exercises designed to evaluate retail branch banking per se. Key also to the evaluation of the service was the need to hold a Girobank account i.e. to be an existing Girobank customer. Girobank services are linked through a core customer relationship via the current account. Consequently we took the decision to utilise existing customers and invite them to participate in an ongoing exercise of service evaluation. This had a number of advantages: customers already knew Girobank and its method of operation - there was no need for them to undergo a learning curve on the service and the way it operates; accounts would not need to be opened or pre-funded - a consequent saving in costs, both in funds and administration time; existing customers would be invisible to customer service staff as 'mystery shoppers'; there would be no clue in their account details that they were a member of an evaluation panel, to all intents and purposes their behaviour would appear as natural; their calls would be indistinguishable from the thousands of calls received by Girobank daily. In addition, we could, within reason, pre-select customers on the basis of their existing account behaviour and product holding to better focus on those service aspects which we wished to evaluate.
The aim of this paper is to define the directions that should be pursued by retail panel research in the next 6 years. A mini-survey was conducted among the major responsible persons in market research at an international level in the clients' companies (mainly in the SDA sector) and among the most important persons on the part of Research Institutes. This survey had a purely qualitative approach, nevertheless I consider it is useful to determine the most important directions that will be pursued by retail panel research. A hypothetical future picture is drawn in the final part of the paper. The main requirements for the future are an improvement of the quality of the data in terms of higher coverage and of higher accuracy. Computer technology will play also an important role in the future of retail panel research: there is the need a for more client-friendly software. Other kinds of data, for example data by named chain, could become important in future, given that the retail structure is changing rapidly across Europe.
The panel is a research method frequently applied to surveys on fast moving consumer goods and media; consumption, exposure to advertising and purchasing behavior are measured in relation to the marketing mix of products. The panel uses methodologies that have been consolidated over time. The attempt to apply these methodologies to non traditional business areas often entails difficulties linked to: sample design; survey method; bias resulting from non-collaboration. This report is going to describe how a panel's design should be built up in order to measure phenomena concerning the mobility of people, specifically concerning average and long journeys, in other words journeys of over 70 kilometers.
The aim of this paper is to illustrate the experimental scheme which our company is running involving the use of a small scale panel of retail points of sale intended specifically for estimation of one parameter: the facing turnover per facing unit. As far as we know, in Italy there is no multiclient tool capable of producing this datum, probably because of the very high cost of managing a panel which complies in full with the sample theory. Tackling this problem in a very pragmatic way, we have built up a low-cost panel capable of generating the datum required with a reliability which we consider satisfactory. This paper provides an illustration of the structure and operation of the panel, the nature of the outputs, the criteria with which we assess the reliability of the data and some of the data obtained.
In this paper we concentrate on a forecasting model for the growth of sales. This model is very interesting, because predictions of the sales for specific shop types are very difficult to make. The models of costs and profits depend on the sales model and are not discussed here. The outline of this paper is as follows. First, the panel framework and corresponding issues are discussed in section 2. The next section describes the forecasting model for the yearly growth of retail sales and discusses the behaviour of the model, using the forecasting results of 1993. Finally, conclusions will be made with reference to the research performed.
This paper presents a case study to illustrate how research based on consumer panels can go beyond its conventional applications in new product performance tracking and market share predictions to facilitate strategic decisions in the area of product portfolio management by offering significant insights into market behaviour and market structure at the aggregate product category level as well as individual brand level. This case study illustrates the use of consumer panel research in making strategic decisions on product portfolio design and management in the toothpaste category at Colgate-Palmolive : India.
Royal Mail, the letter delivery business of the Post Office, subscribed to a bespoke consumer panel comprising 1000 households in April 1985. This paper briefly examines the day to day operation of the panel, including agency input and traces the development and changes required to the diary questionnaire to date. The paper then covers in far greater detail the main types of analysis derived from the panel and the uses to which they are put. This will include data that shows the uptake of retail stamps, the rise in direct mail and the effect on mail volumes during the 1988 postal strike. During this 5 week strike, mail was put on ice by the mailer, until the strike ended, or simply not posted according to content type. The usefulness of the panel as a platform for additional Ad-Hoc questionnaires will be demonstrated. The panel achieves cost savings and more importantly the analysis proves more useful to product managers. Data from these Ad-Hoc surveys is easily linked to the main data with the result that a full picture of "just how the average consumer interacts with Royal Mail" is built up. One such example demonstrates how the perception of consumers about how long they take to pay bills is different to the actual time taken. The effect of piggy backing additional Ad-Hoc surveys on to the main panel will be investigated. This takes the form of an analysis of the different response levels both prior to questionnaire despatch and subsequent periods following return. The response data analysed is from 1992 to the present date.
This paper deals with the fusion of BARB TV viewing information onto Superpanel, AGB's consumer purchasing panel. It breaks new ground in terms of the fusion technique used. Rather than matching panel members by commonly held demographic characteristics, the matching process is performed on individuals' TV viewing habits. This has been achieved by administering a detailed viewing questionnaire to each Superpanel housewife covering their viewing by daypart, selected programmes by channel, programme genres and the types of programme they enjoy. Thus the claimed viewing habits of Superpanel respondents are matched against the metered viewing behaviour of the BARB panel members. The resultant fused dataset contains the actual purchasing of individual Superpanel housewives together with their individual probabilities of viewing each commercial television channel at a given time (i.e. every commercial break).
Our experience shows that there is a marked difference between the Personal Care area and Food and Drink. Although specific personal care habits differ by country (as referred to in the paper) in general they are similar enough for exactly the same diary to be used to record these habits across five countries. Eating and drinking habits differ markedly, however. The original British diary has been shown to be suitable for Germany and Denmark, but in some ways inadequate to capture accurately habits in France and Italy. We have, therefore, had to make changes to reflect this. The paper details these changes made with an eye on our main goal to provide information that is comparable across countries.
In Germany, retailers frequently use costly, store-wide theme promotions to increase consumer traffic and overall sales. Until recently, promotions were considered a necessary cost-of-doing-business and payback analyses for these events were restricted to the sales side of the equation. To a great extent, consumer reaction to promotions were disregarded because of shortcomings in existing data sources. The 1992 introduction of Nielsen Single Source household panel in Germany is an alternative which fills this information gap. Single Source covers purchases of all Fast Moving Consumer Goods through all outlets, and links household purchases with objectively collected retailer promotion information at the individual household level. Using Single Source, we are investigating consumer response to a June 1993 promotion campaign with which a major German retailer - Tengelmann - celebrated its 100th anniversary. During the month of this event, advertising and aggressive trade promotions were executed in a wide variety of product categories. The effects of the heavy promotions can clearly be seen by looking at changes in penetration rates, unit sales per occasion and total cash bill values across time. Both in total and in many categories, Tengelmann gained a large number of new buyers but these effects were only temporary. The case study demonstrates that data sets having the capability for multi-category analysis in conjunction with analysis of total purchase trip values and retailer loyalty bring real value to retailer event evaluation. Increased category/brand sales under promotion conditions can now be analysed from the consumer side, e.g., separating buyers into stockpilers versus new buyers, and identifying whether the latter are brand- and/or store-switchers.