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The authors of this paper argue that the rise of new technologies such as databases and the Internet offer both new challenges and opportunities to the market research industry. At a time when CRM is reported to have grown more than 30% a year with projected total revenues of $12.1 billion by the end of 2001, it is noteworthy that few traditional market research firms have seized the opportunity. Despite embracing the Internet for data collection, few research companies have been able to translate research technology and talent to take advantage of this huge business opportunity. Although data collection is a key benefit of the Internet, a bigger potential benefit is the delivery of information and insights to decisions makers via the Internet. The emerging CRM industry makes this a central goal and is reaping the benefits. The paper presents both theoretical and case study findings that offer a new way to relate to market research that can potentially bring the research industry to the top of executives priority list.
Responding to a call by a major consumer electronics company to accelerate the pace and quality of product development, J Walter Thompson (Detroit) and Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. (New York) developed a new paradigm. The paradigm incorporates current as well as new research procedures into a cost-effective, rapid, sustainable development system, with ongoing market feedback. This paper presents the components of that approach, illustrates the changes in the market research paradigm that ensue, and presents data from a case history on PDAs (personal digital assistant).
The audiometer*, a generic term perhaps preferable to radiometer given its applications equally to TV as for radio audience measurement, offers the marketplace a major technological advance in the measurement of broadcast audiences. The Radiocontrol Watch is used in Switzerland for national radio audience measurement. In the United States Arbitron has mounted its Philadelphia 300 Panel. This paper reviews the critical issue of the validity of these new systems. Do they actually measure what they purport to measure? Do people actually wear the devices from first thing in the morning to last thing at night? How exposed are they to false negatives and false positives: failing to pick up media exposure that has taken place, crediting TV/radio viewing/listening when there was none? These are the early days, but the early evidence from Arbitron and Radiocontrol looks most promising.
ESOMAR has sought ways to help standardise some of the procedures used in market research surveys. This does not in any way imply that we are seeking to treat Europe or any other part of the world as single homogeneous markets. On the contrary, our aim is to look for ways in which the tools we use in research can be made more comparable from one country to another so that the true diversity of the marketplace can be more readily identified. This chapter reports work carried out over a number of years. It represents an attempt to develop a common system for assessing the social and economic standing of the populations in the various countries of Europe. The system is designed for Europe, but we believe that it may also have applications in other parts of the world, either as it stands or in a modified form.
Created and funded by the television industry, SMART (Systems for Measuring And Reporting Television) has developed a variety of new a approaches to providing reliable audience data in the face of dramatic changes in television transmission technology and home usage. This paper describes SMARTS achievements in core research, panel cooperation and maintenance, encoding/decoding programs tuned, quality control, and reporting software.
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a fourth generation media planning system that encompasses at the same time several media and several countries in a multiple objectives perspective.
While well-formalized, repetitive decision processes might adequately be represented by quantitative data and solved by algorithms the analysis of less formalized, ill-structured decision scenarios heavily relies upon qualitative data. For the latter, heuristic principles as applied by Decision Support Systems gain relevance. In general, strategic marketing decisions have to face a highly complex and dynamic environment. Therefore, a practicable decision tool is needed to assist the manager in structuring ill-defined, sporadically occurring marketing problems. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as described by SAAIY (19800 serves this purpose well. It decomposes a complex problem, structures its components hierarchically and evaluates the different decision alternatives according to their contribution to superior decision criteria. Firstly, this paper discusses the relevance of Decision Support Systems for strategic marketing decisions. Thereafter, approach and technical procedure of the AHP is described by an example. Finally, the paper points out the practical relevance of the AHP. As a Decision Support System the AHP fulfills all the requirements of Decision Calculus as defined by Little (1970): It is simple, robust, controllable, flexible, complete and easy to communicate.
The MIS system is a system developed for management within Marketing and Sales at Volvo Car Corporation in Gothenburg, Sweden. The project started in 1986 and MIS has become a strategic product and a powerful support for management in their decision making. We have in MIS put together information from many different areas, for example sales, stocks, car market development, finance and research and we present this information in a clear and understandable way complemented with many different graphic display possibilities. The objective for the MIS project was: providing decision makers within Marketing & Sales with "management information" on a range of key areas and key markets. The guiding principle in our work was to "create order". In the first place MIS is developed for our Management Group, but we have gradually spread the use of the system and we have today some 100 users. As we have a considerable difference in computer experience among the users, we have made great efforts in keeping a uniform layout throughout the whole system and also to keep the system self instructive. The success factors for the MIS system is that we began to sell in the idea from the top and down through the organization, and that practically the entire organization was involved and last the close contact between the work group and the steering committee.
The paper describes the implementation of a system using a CATI package and a predictive or statistical autodialer. The autodialer has the capacity to detect if a human voice has answered the telephone and make a connection to an available interviewer, this also means that busy signals, ring no answers and other unwanted calls can be eliminated. Dialing many numbers at once means that interviewers can be kept almost continuously interviewing. The principles of predictive autodialers are described with reference to their enhanced performance over manual dialing systems. The construction of the system interface between the EIS autodialer ( Electronic Information Systems Inc USA) and the Quancept CATI package is examined next. This describes the form of changes required to the CATI system (i.e no longer user initiated dialing) and how this can influence the performance of the package The next section of the paper describes a "case history" of such a system. This reviews management and performance issues which occurred in a real life situation using the autodialer system described previously. Finally there is a discussion of future work on the system that is planned and speculation on the impact of such systems on the economics of telephone interviewing.
This paper briefly describes a continuous market information system for the travel industry in Sweden and shows various applications and usage possibilities. The paper shows how the system can be used to monitor basic market volumes as number of trips, number of nights and money spent for the most important types of travelling, i.e. private and business travel, in Sweden and abroad, and trips including overnight stays as well as longer one-day trips. It is also illustrated how the overall travel volumes can be described in terms of travel month/season, destination, means of transport, type of accommodation, main purpose and type of travel arrangement. It is demonstrated how this data can be used to describe and monitor various sub-markets.