Archive for the ‘Esurveys’ Category
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
First of all - A Happy and Prosperous New Year to all our readers!
Although New Year is typically a time to look forward to new events and experiences, we thought we’d break with that convention somewhat in our first post of 2008, by having a quick review of the year just gone on The Market Research Blog. With that in mind, here’s a quick rundown of our most popular posts from 2007, just in case you’re a newcomer to our blog or if you simply missed something we posted in the last year:
- Guerrilla Marketing - When Less Is More
- The Benefits Of Advertising
- Choosing A Logo
- White Paper: China and India -The Growth Debate Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
- Meeting the Needs of the Retail Industry
- Which Brands Have People Been Discussing This Week?
- Online Leadership Portal - Part 1 | Part 2
- Market Research - The Key To Business Success - Part 1 | Part 2 | Top Tips
- Go Figure - Pricing & Segmentation - Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
- Professional Services and Valuing the Customer
- The Market Research Industry in India - Part 1 | Part 2
- Will Television Advertising Arrest Starbucks’ Slumber?
- Logo Research - Approach With Caution
- The Benefits Of Online Research
- Are Brands Like Caricatures?
- Market Research Prices - A Global Comparison Part 1 | Part 2
- Marketing and Selling to Chinese Businesses Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
- The Ultimate In Customer-Driven Pricing
- Do You Understand Your Customers?
- Ten Tips On Branding
From our point of view, 2007 was a big year of expansion for B2B International - especially in terms of getting our Asian office in China up and running as well as unprecedented growth at our central operations in the UK. Naturally, we’re hoping for bigger and better things in the year to come - and we wish you much the same.
We’ll get into the swing of things proper in the next few days with some more of our thoughts on market research, the universe and everything else!
Posted in
Qualitative Research, Pricing Strategy, Quantitative Research, Segmentation, Market Research India, SMEs, Online Research, Market Research China, Advertising Research, Market Research, Branding, Customer Satisfaction, Market Assesment, Esurveys, B2B News |
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Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
Continuing our post from yesterday, we look in further detail at current issues in Indian market research. This concluding part examines the role of technology as well as what the future holds for the industry in the country:
TechTalk
Ironically, India is a software powerhouse - but Indian market research has yet to catch up on the technological front. Markey research firms still use basic software tools, and that too is only on a need-to basis.
India is still face-to-face dependent, but that is changing gradually. CATI is prevalent but online is still a nascent area as internet penetration is low. Panel firms are already entering India in a big way, setting the stage for the e-wave to sweep across in due course.
The needs of market research agencies are still evolving in terms of newer applications; there seems to be no significant difference in the use of technology in the past and the present; evolution in technology is seen more in terms of version upgrades, automation and processing speed. The bulk of small and medium sized market research firms are still tied to the traditional tech tools and are yet to experiment with new modes, though a few have dabbled with the online platform. The big players on the other hand are moving forward with handheld terminals and mobile surveys.
The trend in technology in client organisations seem to have undergone a sea change; they are looking at shorter innovation cycles, real-time service of queries, transparent status reading systems, end-to-end interaction with consumers using enhanced technology; and technology is expected to take them a step ahead - from analysis to modelling.
Boom Boom: The way ahead
Client organisations are more receptive to applying DW & BI and Data Mining. These services will soon be embraced by the research organisations, leveraging on the availability of a good education pool. Just as product companies go through the evolution lifecycle, the research service industry also needs to upgrade and come up with newer client servicing options - like branded market research agencies setting up in-house research divisions for larger corporations (this will ensure data security, real time data available at every stage).
The future of Indian research from a market opportunity point of view is very bright simply given the growth in economy and the increasing need for consumer insights for sound decision-making. This includes Multinational corporations and the new Indian ventures on the retail, realty and hospitality front. What will determine success or failure is how the agencies can transition themselves and put in structures and technology in place to tap the opportunity.
Globalisation will continue to drive the research standardisation wave and the time to get involved with Indian research is… NOW.
This article originally appeared in the Oct/Nov issue of BIG times
Further details about conducting market research in Asian markets such as India can be found at the website of our Asian office, at www.b2binternational.com.cn.
Posted in
Online Research, Market Research India, Market Research China, International Market Research, Market Research, Esurveys, Articles |
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Friday, June 1st, 2007
Market research findings from business-to-business market research specialists B2B International analyse the current state of business broadband usage.
Point Topic provide focused information on broadband communications services and its website is internationally recognised as one of the best sources of information on broadband.
In its quest to provide key statistics and other data for the benefit of the world broadband industry, free of charge, Point Topic commissioned B2B International to survey 1000 businesses to discover the decision-making factors in various broadband issues, including ICT drivers and churn, spending on broadband and security, online activity, internet usage and applications.
Reliability is increasingly the driver over low prices in users’ choice of ISP, closely followed by quality of service. Around 12% of businesses say they changed ISP in the 6 months up to March 2007 – this churn rate has remained similar to a year ago. Companies more likely to churn are those involved in media, computer, internet or online retailing.
B2B’s Matt Powell, in charge of the research, says “internet dependency is growing. In May 2006, about half of all workplaces still found the loss of internet not very or not at all disruptive yet by March 2007, this group shrunk to just under 20%. Now more than 80% of workplaces say loss of internet for a whole day would be disruptive to their business whilst more than a third (36%) believe loss of the internet would be extremely disruptive.�
Use of passwords and anti-spam tools are used by all sizes of businesses. Apart from the very smallest companies (1-2 people), offsite backup is above 35% for businesses with under 5 employees rising to take-up of 50% of businesses above 20 employees. The more serious measures such as recovery plans, regulatory compliance and usage monitoring are correlated heavily with the size of company.
Email (90%), information searches (75%), ordering online (71%) and large file transfers (61%) continue to dominate online activity in UK businesses, with more than 60% of workplaces using the internet for these functions in March 2007.
Research shows that VPN take-up increases with the size of company across most types of company user. Home workers are the main users of VPNs, with over 40% of workplace home workers using VPN to access the company network.
Video conferencing has grown by more than 100% in the year to March 2007, while there has been a 58% growth in internet telephony (VoIP), according to BS2 respondents. Financial retail sites are found to be the most VoIP-ready workplaces, with more than 30% of them using it.
Point Topic conduct regular independent surveys into business broadband issues.
Posted in
Industrial Research, Market Assesment, Esurveys, B2B News |
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Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
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.”
Posted in
Qualitative Research, Quantitative Research, Online Research, Online Focus Groups, Esurveys, Market Research |
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Friday, February 2nd, 2007
We are firm believers in ‘Online’ here at B2B International and we are always looking forward to see ways in which it will progress and what the current trends are for online research. Pete Comley, of Virtual Survey, recently identified 10 key trends for online research in the consumer market. Pete believes that:
1. Online will get cheaper
2. Online panels will get bigger
3. Response rates will decline
4. There will be an online register
5. There will be better fraud detection
6. There will be more profiling/specialist panels
7. More clients will do their own surveys
8. Online software will evolve
9. We’ll adopt more adult relationships
10. Research 2.0 will arrive
As a business-to-business company, the trend we feel will be of the greatest importance is the growth of the specialist panel. With the business market moving at such a fast rate, the emerging markets need to be researched and this could be made difficult with Pete’s prediction that response rates will decline. So it will be hugely important that specialist panels are setup and used to their full potential.
Posted in
Online Focus Groups, Online Research, Esurveys, Industry News, B2B News, Articles |
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