The subject of this report are the specific details concerning the launching of the GEO magazine. All other details that were taken into consideration like the analysis of the market, the competition, the target groups, the marketing objectives, etc. related to the two markets in which magazines are of interest, that is, the advertisement market and the circulation market are only mentioned where necessary for a clear understanding.
The problem I am going to present you regards a study which has contributed to solve a major problem of the client, a car manufacturer, and which has engaged our institute in a new area of technical development, quite unusual as compared with the normal fields of operation for a market research company. I shall try here to point out the main problems we had to face, without, of course, entering into much details, due to the complexity also of some mathematical aspects involved. The unusual problem which the client submitted us some three years ago was the following. We were asked: 1. To find a way for measuring, on a continuous basis, the "reliability", of each mechanical or electrical component of a selected list of car models in 4 European countries.
The following paper is to inform you about some aspects which are the result of a multinational research project, named the European Health Panel. It analyses the health status and the consumption of pharmaceutical products. With a written interview it firstly collects information on the attitudes and secondly surveys the behavior with a diary covering 28 days. The European Health Panel is a continuous Market research instrument, which is running at the moment in Germany and in France.
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.
This paper presents the results of a European study which examined the attitudes of the professional and managerial social classes in Belgium, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands and West Germany towards the image of countries and companies identified with them. It indicates the importance of the image of the country of ownership of a company, when that company is trying to sell its goods or services abroad. The results, country by country, were strikingly similar.
Gallup International was commissioned by Hakuhodo Inc., acting on behalf of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, to conduct a survey on the Image of Japan in Europe today. Approximately 1000 people were interviewed by the Gallup affiliates in each of the following five countries: Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. A feature of the survey was the use of standardised demographics across all five countries in order to facilitate comparable analysis for each country.
Sceptical opinions have been voiced about the use of telephone interviews, in spite of its advantages. In particular in countries with a low degree of telephone penetration the lower representativity of the sample and consequently, poorer survey results are expected to raise problems. Another question is whether the conditions of telephone interviews, too, produce differences with personal (face-to-face) interviews and whether all these factors play a role in image research. The survey described in this paper involves the measurement of features characterising supermarkets. A comparison was made between several identical surveys conducted in different countries. An analysis of results obtained shows that telephone surveys will produce the same results as personal surveys, provided that there are fairly marked differences in objects and that the number of relevant basic characteristics is limited.
This paper sets out to examine whether a better understanding of the problems and actual behaviour of patients could be used to improve the pharmaceutical industry's communications with the doctor. The results of recent group discussions carried out with chronic sufferers of asthma in the U.K. and France, and with arthritics in the U.K., are used to illustrate the direct and indirect influences of the patients' behaviour on the doctors' prescribing decision.
This paper describes the results of a survey of Pharmaceutical Companies that was conducted to investigate current procedures for 'long range' product and market forecasts. The survey was conducted by means of postal questionnaires that were kindly completed by Executives in 34 different companies. The results of the survey are shown separately for each of the categories of respondent company, revealing some differences in practice and treatment of data for forecasting purposes. The main inputs for forecasting examined in the survey were retail audit data,, medical index data and internal company data. The survey results suggest that there is greater variation in the sophistication of forecasting methods than in the uses to which the resulting long range forecasts are put. Whilst the survey provides a broad view of current long range forecasting in the Pharmaceutical Industry, it was not intended to examine the particular methods used by individual companies in great detail.
Five countries will be compared. This selection is influenced by random and does not mean, that other countries and their distribution systems are unimportant or not worth describing. We only looked at the systems for consumer (mass) magazines. Distribution of magazines can be described as a management task to deliver the right quantity of copies at the right time to the right number and quality of outlets to sell an optimal circulation figure, whatever that means, as part of the magazine objectives. In this sense, we like to describe and compare the keywords of the five different distribution systems in order to reach the named target. The comparison must stay on the surface. Every reader of one of the described countries will find his country described wrong and incomplete. But perhaps the comparison even on this base makes some sense. Because of the heavy proportion of single copy sales in four out of those five countries, the comparison is mainly describing the relevant channel publisher -> wholesaler -> retailer.
The material for this paper is based upon the many years of experience Market Investigations has in collecting and publishing data on the veterinary markets. This experience is principally based in Great Britain but more recently in Holland and France. The majority of the data we shall be using in this paper is derived from work relating to the series of Veterinary Indices that we produce but has also been augmented by general information collected through specialised surveys carried out on an ad hoc basis. The theme of this paper is the Differing Structure of Veterinary Practice. This can be approached in two ways and we propose to do just that. The first part of the paper will examine the structure in terms of: the number of veterinary surgeons, the number of veterinary practices, the types and size of veterinary practice and the extent of livestock farming. The second part of the paper will examine the structure of the market for veterinary products.