Particularly in recent times, the market research industry has also focused more attention on the teeth of self-regulation: control and compliance. ESOMAR has invested a considerable amount of energy in developing an approach on the international level. But interesting models have also been developed on the national level. In addition to the Market Research Society in the uk, the Rat der Deutschen Markt- und Sozialforschung (Council for German Market and Social Research) has developed its own took-kit for self regulation. The complaints procedure provides for a range of measures and sanctions. Leaders in the market research industry have repeatedly pointed out that the international harmonisation of ways of working is a priority. It is encouraging to note that a pilot project is now also being initiated with leading associations in the various continents to work together to develop national compliance processes that are based on the German model.
Technological advances are engendering debate on the survey production line, but the process is only part of the story. Are we in the grip of a drive not towards insight but towards mere automation? Do we want our data deeper or just cheaper? Much existing online research tries to recreate a comfortable environment for researchers (i.e. controlled focus groups, moderated email groups, sampled and/or panel surveys, etc.). Perhaps this is because we tend to work in an experimental, quasi-scientific way and in control of the data collection process. Nobody would disagree that these initiatives represent excellent practical applications of the new media. This paper argues that such control is often not necessary nor desirable. It is time to put the participant in control of the process via hypercontext. There are a number of opportunities opening up via the internet to collect and interpret information in a way fundamentally different from traditional methods. The internet gives the opportunity to shift perceptions in the same way as did new qualitative methods of the 1960s.
In this and the following paper, the phenomena associated with and the nature of "survey error" is explored.
This paper is not so much about magazines or micros as about management, and in particular the use of information in management decisions. It just happens that the writer's business is magazines and he has found in the microcomputer the ideal tool for handling marketing and financial information in a disciplined, but flexible and imaginative, way.
SPAR has been designing, implementing, evaluating and executing promotional programs since 1967. Our approach has been successfully implemented in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. In the UK, through a joint agreement, AGB supports our services there. SPAR's method has been applied to almost every form of sales promotion event, trade and consumer, from case discounting, co-op monies and payment for retailer programs to consumer packs and special forms of couponing. SPAR's approach has been proven successful by providing reliable and actionable information for a wide variety of categories.
This paper consists of two parts - in the first part Vincent Ophoff, Managing Director of NSS and President of the IRIS network, describes the "process control" necessary for successful design and management of multinational surveys. In the second, Jane Kalim, International Co-ordinator at Research Services Ltd, discusses two of the practical issues of country differences, sampling techniques and fieldwork.
All designing a controlled experiment should begin with the design of the ideal experiment. If the ideal experiment cannot be executed because of financial, factual, moral, or legal obstacles, we should make a systematic effort to save the controlled character of the experiment by redesigning its objectionable features. As a rule, the redesigned experiment will be less powerful than the ideal one, and we must then decide whether we want to live with that loss or move to quasi-experimental designs. The review in this paper of redesign strategies that have saved controlled experiments in the past should help us to be prepared and inventive the next time our ideal experimental design runs into a roadblock.
The analysis described in this report concerns the control techniques used in sample surveys , and is based on a ten-year experience made by field work in this area and specifically applied to the survey on the Italian Periodical Press Readership by the Italian population aged 15 and above. This survey was commissioned by twenty publishers of periodical magazines and provides with the characteristics of readers of more than 60 publications; agencies use it for preparing their media plans in advertising campaigns.
The highly important but complicated channel of distribution - the vending machine, has not yet been covered by a market research institute as to the flow of products through it. Of course, we do have distribution data, but no information about turnover or other important and interesting aspects are available. Based on this, the A. C. Nielsen Company has worked on this subject and has developed an instrument with the aid of which it is possible to offer exact and multiple data for this special market. An innovation can be presented in the auditing technique as well as to exactly measure the effect of promotional activities. The first approach in covering this market was made in the field of cigarettes.
The need for an analytical penetration by newspaper and magazine distribution as well as the essential need for management to take an interest in entrepreneurial problems in this sphere, indeed to a higher degree than the branded article business normally demands, is stressed by the fact that it is impossible to balance peaks of demand and production by inventories. Secondly, the extraordinarily high number of distribution points, each with a relatively small turnover, which on the one hand undoubtedly helps to increase the breadth of supply of newspaper and magazines to the public but which, on the other hand, causes great problems by fluctuating buying patterns.