Many business settings are recently being moved online due to concerns about the spread of the new Coronavirus (COVID-19), and a rapid increase in the need for online resources is expected in the area of face-to-face offline surveys.Join this session to learn how you can leverage utilizing a comprehensive online insights platform to conduct quantitative/qualitative consumer research towards APAC's largest consumer panelist network in one-stop.
Many business settings are recently being moved online due to concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus (COVID-19), and a rapid increase in the need for online resources is expected in the area of face-to-face offline surveys.Join this session to learn how you can leverage utilising a comprehensive online insights platform to conduct quantitative/qualitative consumer research towards APAC's largest consumer panelist network in one-stop.
Is the respondent disappearing? For some years now, non-response has been a major cause of concern for market researchers. And those people who are still prepared to co-operate in research, i.e. the respondents, are being converted into participants and ambassadors. Traditional methods are apparently being traded in for bricolage, ethnography, semiotics, diaries, photographs, home videos, observation and large workshops with consumers or clients (so-called consumer shoe groups). Disciplines such as linguistics, neuroscience and cognitive psychology are being used to provide additional consumer insight. This is indeed fascinating but what are we actually doing by giving the respondent a different and sometimes broader role? What exactly is being measured and how reliable is the information? There is also a growing trend to contact respondents through remote control. A considerable amount of research is being conducted using online access panels especially when it comes to international research. This development offers quite a few opportunities but on the other hand, you no longer see or hear the respondent at all. Who is participating in this type of research? What can you do and what should you not do? Which tools can be used and which not? The total lack of physical contact has its advantages but there are also a number of obvious limitations.
The paper describes the work that has been carried out to test a set of existing marketing research methodologies applied to the internet environment. One of the objectives of this project is to test how spontaneous opinions can be used as a valuable input for marketing research activities, mainly in customer satisfaction research. It also describes the early stages of building an internet consumer panel out of an already existent internet community. The results at this stage of the project are based on the analysis of opinions already given and rated by the virtual community members, without being asked any additional questions.
The purpose of this chapter is to explain how market information based upon retail sales is derived and used by manufacturers and retailers to make better business decisions. Since the emergence of mass marketing, manufacturers of fast turnover packaged goods have wanted information about the performance of their brands, both against key competitors, and the market as a whole. For the fifty years prior to 1980, such information came from two main sources: consumer panels and retail audits.
The word panel describes a continuous collection of identical information from a sample which represents a segment of a population to study. It is by definition permanent and repetitive. There are as many varieties of panels as there are different populations and methods for measuring them. The research objective must determine which population will be studied and the nature of the information collected. For example, we can have doctor panels which measure their prescription orders, user panels which measure specific products or services, measures of the media audience and of course shop panels. In this chapter, we will take a particular interest in those studies generally known as consumer panels. Their objective is to specifically record the everyday purchases of different households. These panels were developed many years ago (since 1948 in the United Kingdom, 1962 in France) in most developed countries and are part of the basic tool kit for professionals working in marketing research and the marketing of mass-consumption products. They are syndicated studies, covering a large number of products and/or services, the results of which are shared between all the players within a given market. This characteristic of covering many customers and many product categories is basic to the very idea of a panel.
This paper describes how consumer panels in Great Britain have been developed in recent years to provide a wide range of services that are of specific relevance to grocery retailers. The paper will go on to describe in more detail three new services that further enhance the retailers understanding of their consumers buying behaviour. The first of these looks at catchment areas, or the distance that consumers travel to their chosen retailer and the ways that this affects their purchasing. The second analyses the classification of a retailers stores into clusters and examines the ways that these can then be employed to maximise their sales with particular reference to Category Management. The third segments consumers by the ways in which they shop and using this to identify areas of strength and weakness.
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.
The national media researches base on readers much more than buyers of the copies: the issue is that there is a lack of market research data able to support marketing decisions regarding circulation level development and control. Readership surveys are not satisfying for the editorial marketing as to the comparison between audience and circulation. Publishers have to know who are the buyers of the titles, how many they are, how they split between heavy, medium and light buyers and how many buy competitive titles. All these issues are figured out in a consumer panel carried out in Italy. The paper describes the research methodology pointing out the main results about news weeklies. The analysis aims to support basic marketing decisions providing the target definition of a title, the main competitors, its potential market (circulation). Moreover, the essay concludes with some applications of the results to the advertising market.
This paper is divided into three sections. The first deals with some of the main points derived from the Adams Readers' Panel which bear on the title. The marketing of books is an order of magnitude more difficult than the marketing of most products, in the sense that each product is different from every other; each package is different; and price and promotion, although more uniform, still vary greatly. What the Panel can do to help is largely to shed fresh types of light on the readers' attitudes to these variables. The second deals with other findings, concerning particularly other book reading and reading of newspapers and magazines. We illustrate the diversity of reading patterns, both of books and journals, and show that, in general, heavy readers of books tend to be heavy readers of printed matter. The third deals with the mechanics of setting up and operating the Panel. We comment on bias accidentally introduced by the choice of incentive (and how changes in wording affected response); on the very high quality of write-in response, in general; the patterns of scoring, within books and within panellists; and the generally satisfactory levels of response and maintenance.
The following, linked, papers argue that representative consumer panels, reflecting actual purchasing behaviour, have a unique role to play in the provision of relevant, actionable information to both the retailers and the manufacturers who wish to sell to them, whether nationally or on a pan-European basis. Allan Breese draws on his own, and TN AGB's, extensive experience in working with such information in Great Britain, which has been in the forefront of many retailing trends and in the development of a panel based response to changing data needs. His case histories cover three main areas: 1) The basic, but important: evaluation of retailer strengths and weaknesses by market, Private Label levels, penetration and trip size/frequency, demographic profiles and loyalty. 2) Shopper studies which analyse why retailers under trade or over trade, and who is benefiting from lost sales. 3) Tailor made studies of the behaviour patterns of a retailer's shoppers, with specific reference to segmentation by size and frequency of shopping trip. Richard Piper examines briefly the current similarities and differences in trade structures and developments in the main European countries, using a major retail study conducted by Europanel, before moving on to illustrate the essential cross- country comparability of consumer panel data and the steps that are being taken to increase its utility at a European level. He includes a description of both the existing Europanel Database and the disaggregated version that is being developed.