This morning’s blog is interesting because it is a harbinger of things to come. We refer to an article in the Financial Times of Tuesday this week in which it talks of online research taking over other methods of data collection for Unilever. Since Unilever virtually invented market research in a commercial sense, we should take note of this.
In the US, 80% of Unilever’s research is now carried out online and the UK and Japan are likely to follow quickly in suit. There is an obvious reason for this. Online research is quicker and cheaper than the phone or face to face interviews. It is the reason for the stellar growth of companies such as YouGov, set up only 7 years ago and now worth £133 million on AIM.
Last week YouGov reported on four surveys in the national press and they were all broad consumer subjects - family breakdowns (Daily Mail), DIY shopping (Daily Express), web surfing (The Guardian/The Sun) and Gordon Brown’s suitability as prime minister (Sunday Times).
The question we business to business researchers must ask ourselves is “can it happen to us?� The problem here is getting the appropriate samples. YouGov has a panel of 150,000 respondents in the UK and they are all consumers. Of course, many consumers are like you and me – they have jobs – and so they could also answer a question in the capacity of their employment. However, that is not going to help a business to business company that wants to look at aircraft deicing fluids because we can be virtually certain that no one (unless we are very lucky) on the panel will be occupied in a job at an airport buying deicing fluids.
At the present, it seems that business to business market researchers will confine their research to customer surveys, using the customer lists (and potential customer lists) that have been built up within the company. Or they will use the panels to carry out surveys of SMEs where the large consumer panels can supply sufficient numbers of proprietors and managers in small businesses. However, what we do know is that most ideas that change the world begin as small dots on the radar screen and one day they can loom large. This online research dot is one that merits a constant watch and report. Enjoy the read and we would be interested in your opinions on this interesting subject.
Unilever to cash in on benefits of web research
By Carlos Grande,Marketing Correspondent Finanical Times April 17 2007
Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch food and personal products group, plans to increase the use of the internet as a market research tool, following the success of its web re-search in the US.
The percentage of Unilever’s US research conducted online has more than doubled to 80 per cent in five years. This is part of a long-term policy by the company to exploit the speed and low cost of the web to research customers’ behaviour.
While the US is its most advanced market, Unilever envisages similar trends in countries where internet access is widely available, such as the UK and Japan. The shift to internet pro-jects by Unilever, which spends an estimated €400m (£272.2m) a year on research, reflects the web’s accelerating impact on the global market research industry. Internet research advocates believe it produces results more quickly and cheaply than phone or face-to-face interviews and focus groups.
Chet Henderson, vice-president of Unilever Insight, the group’s research division, said the catalyst for putting projects online in any country was the point at which half the population had internet access -a figure the UK achieved in 2003. Mr Henderson said: “As soon as we get to that, we can get the benefits of the speed of internet research.”
Mr Henderson said that according to Unilever’s internal data testing, internet responses also tended to be more honest than those gained by traditional methods. “In some countries, people are far more honest on the internet,” he said.
The move to web research by big consumer groups underlines the business opportunity for internet-only research companies trying to grab business from established research networks.
Market research was worth about $16bn (£8bn) in the world’s five biggest territories in 2005, including $7.7bn in the US and $2.4bn in the UK.
Web researchers typically recruit a big panel of res-pondents via the internet and ask them to complete rapid response online questionnaires.
Webcams and online chatrooms are sometimes used to create virtual focus groups.
In Unilever’s case, it believes the web could be 10-20 per cent cheaper than traditional methods. Senior Unilever brand executives think that greater use of technology has gone hand in hand with a broader change in research approaches. Mr Henderson said: “Where you lose is in not being able to have a conversation. People type in a lot less than they say and online you miss the non-verbal way people signal their reactions.”
Nevertheless, Unilever believes it can exploit the web to conduct increasingly sophisticated research.
Gerardo Rozanksi, global brand vice-president of Rexona - the deodorant brand known as Sure in the UK - said: “We are shifting the focus into more strategic work. So we ask people less often, ‘What do you think about this specific product?’ and more about their lives and opinions in generic terms to give us the under-lying insights to come up with solutions.”
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on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under Qualitative Research, Quantitative Research, Online Research, Online Focus Groups, Esurveys, Market Research.
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