This paper covers similarities and differences between countries and cultures which can affect how qualitative methodologies can be applied to offer comparable, research data to international marketers. The paper describes three ways of helping to ensure that international deliverables are relevant, comparable and meaningful.
Television is increasingly an international medium that transcends country boundaries. Similarly, for radio there is nowadays a keen interest in being able to compare audiences between markets. The requirement, therefore, for audience systems themselves to be comparable from one country to another has become a priority for both broadcasters themselves and the commercial marketplace. For international advertisers and advertising-funded channels, GGTAM is an attempt to establish an international âexchange rateâ for TV audience measurement systems throughout the world.
For many years, a debate has been going on, sometimes heated, other times controlled, about the quality of research that is being carried out in the Middle East and how it compares to that of the larger European countries. Why this should be so owes as much to the difficulties and peculiarities of the region as to the myths that were created and disseminated by the people in the industry. The paper will firstly look at the difficulties and how these were overcome, and then at the myths and their perpetrators. The difficulties centre around sampling methods in the absence of easily available sampling frames and the lack of trained personnel, especially interviewers. It will be shown how sampling frames were painstakingly constructed and how an organisation was created to train and control interviewers. It will show how telephone interviewing is feasible in certain circumstances and impossible in others. Finally, the paper will show how low literacy rates were overcome and self-completion of certain questions was emulated, using magnetic boards and graphic presentations. This did not produce, however, any significantly different results from the usual methods.
This paper presents some of our experiences which bear on these points. The focus is on two issues: system design (a system overview, "consumerizing" research systems, and system design strategies) and multi-national system comparability.
Every time we are asked to do cross-national advertising research, we must worry about comparability of data across countries. Unfortunately, we still do not know the situations and conditions under which we can clearly justify a universal approach to advertising research. The purpose of this paper is to explore those situations or conditions which indicate that one must make adjustments in his research methodology and procedures in conducting multi-country advertising research. Not only should we identify the determinant conditions for making adjustments, we must also identify specific areas of research methodology which must be adjusted in the presence of a determinant condition. In other words, this paper will address the problem of what to change or adjust in multi-country advertising research under what specific conditions or situations.
Monotony and its side-effects have been dealt with in other areas. But monotony is powerful enough to adulterate the results. Noelle Neumann proved that the influence of monotony was visible even in simple inquiries, for example when ascertaining readership figures of daily newspapers. If the questionnaire was dreary, fewer respondents than before admitted that they read the various newspapers, as opposed to results obtained by a questionnaire design that instigated the respondent's activity. In the course of evaluating secondary empirical data at the Institut flir Demoskopie Allensbach my attention was drawn to the subject of monotony and its effects from another angle.
This paper discusses the various approaches that can be used when conducting international research with particular reference to the benefits of working with a Multinational Research Company or Group. The approaches that a company can adopt when conducting international research can vary widely from the highly centralised (commission direct from a central point) to the highly decentralised (commission at local level, with international management exercising a more or less loose overall coordination function). International Groups can service an international company's needs whatever the preferred approach. Indeed, International Groups are set up for this purpose, with consequent advantages in terms of quality, international comparability and international orientation.
In this paper I will describe two multi-country advertising research studies which have been carried out by my company during the past three years. These studies have highlighted a number of problems and have taught us some lessons about how to achieve maximum international comparability at minimum time and cost expenditure. You may, of course, question some of the basic assumptions underlying both the research methods used and the value of researching advertisements multi-nationally. It is not the purpose of my paper to go into these questions. However, perhaps I need to make it clear that I regard the objective of this type of advertising research as essentially to check the attention value and communications efficiency of the advertisements under consideration and not to assess their relative selling power or "persuasion".
Comments on the presentations of P. Berent, Hansen/Damm and Morello.
I have referred to comparability in a very limited sense, namely the exact replication of research methods across a number of countries. I have done so because comparability is so often discussed in these terms, or because it is felt - whether implicitly or explicitly - that comparability in the sense of comparability of results involves or depends on comparability of techniques. I should, therefore, like to make a very clear distinction between: 1. Comparability at the data-collection stage; 2. Comparability at the interpretation stage.
In 1969 the European Editions of The Reader's Digest conducted a multi-country survey in 16 countries of Western Europe. I propose to tell you something of how we did it: the problems we met, the actions we took and what we think we learned. Hopefully it will be of interest to those of you who might learn from our mistakes - and perhaps of wry amusement to those who have already made the same mistakes for themselves.