SSi's blog has a comprehensive post on the major initiatives to increase data quality of online results, the post summarises the objectives of four initiatives and it outlines the differences between the following initiatives:
Informative blogs: to share what one knows, what one comes across at work, etc.
Personal blogs: to share who I am, not my knowledge, but my personality drives the blog.
Opinionating blogs: the more informative, news type of blog often lavished with personal opinions.
The advantages of having my blog are obvious: Having a blog is an easy way to share my ideas and knowledge with whomever is interested in them. I also hope to receive quick feed back and new ideas for issues or questions I have. There are some draw backs too: It's rather time consuming, and if you have a blog, it should be a relevant and good one. The entire world can leave comments so I pretty much feel vulnerable with what I leave behind. But to be honest: may main reason for starting this blog is that I think I need to understand what it is all about by experiencing it myself. How will blogging change the way we do market research? What influence will blogging have on our industry, companies and culture? Will blogging present any viable revenue opportunities for businesses? So I am just trying! Or as Anne Frank said: "How wonderful it is that nobody need to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. "
I've received a couple of reactions to my post regarding Eurostat's recent on-line Internet penetration figures in Europe (I actually received two e-mails to be exact). Both reactions came from colleagues from Eastern Europe. Both of you made a similar point about the fact that it's interesting to read about Research 2.0, but your countries still have very low penetration of Internet users (your examples: Bulgaria 19% and Romania 22%) so it seems little relevant as a method. These comments triggered a question: Is on-line research by default impossible whenever the Internet penetration is low? To check to what extent Internet may be a feasible option for on-line data-collection I ask myself three questions regarding the Internet penetration: 1. What is the Internet penetration figure in that Country, and how is it defined? 2. What is the total number of absolute users of the Internet in that country? 3. Out of those, which percentage connects to the Internet using a broadband connection? Let me further address these questions below by taking Slovenia and the Ukraine as an example.
1. Internet penetration figures
The Internet penetration in Slovenia is 58% according to Eurostat. No figures are given for the Ukraine, so I use the Internet World Stats page with figures all countries in the world. On the Ukraine they report 12%.
Since both Internet usage numbers come from various sources so we need to understand the exact definition before comparing: "ever used the Internet" versus "used in the past two weeks" makes quite a difference. Same counts for Internet penetration on a household level versus an individual level.
I normally use the first rule of thumb to check feasibility of the method: whenever the general Internet usage is over 50% of total population in a country, I consider on-line a possible alternative for research on consumer goods and services.
So with 58% in Slovenia I'd conclude we should be able to use on-line as a platform, but the Ukraine seems to be a challenge… But there's more to ask:
2. Absolute amount of Internet users
Slovenia has a total population of 2.0 million people; the Ukraine has 45.8 million inhabitants. This should put the percentages into perspective: 58% of 2 million gives over 1 million of Internet users while 12% of 45 million makes the total available universe in the Ukraine 5.3 million!
If the Internet penetration is lower than 50% in a country, but the total amount of Internet users is around 10 million or more, Internet may still be a valid as an alternative approach
The total universe of Internet users may still give us a viable sample population, but there is even more to consider: 3. Number of broadband connections This figure is important because broadband users tend to interact with the Internet differently than dial-up users. Dial up is all about transactional use of the web (mail, limited file transfer etc), whereas broadband users surf the Web for content, information and entertainment and they are more likely to engage in online commerce and tend to consequently be more Internet savvy. We must remember that we don’t undertake on-line research using the Internet at large, we using panels, and these panels are representative neither of the Internet population as a whole nor the general public.On-line panel members are predominantly broadband internet users because online research requires both frequent access, higher bandwidth and longer periods on-line which are less viable for dial up customers. As a rule of thumb, for online to be relevant for conducting research in your market, there needs to be (overall or geographically specific) a broadband penetration of at least 30%. It's actually 27% in Slovenia and for the Ukraine the figures are not given. So while no strict rules can be given, you now realize that you probably should not be focussing at the internet penetration percentage alone, the absolute amount of users and the number of broadband connections is also entering into the feasibility equation!
After analysing the Internet usage in a country, we will now have to check the availability of a good quality online respondent panel of sufficient size and with a high enough response rate, but these open a whole new set of questions to ask, perhaps more about these questions in a future post!
Drop me a note, or better: leave a comment if you want to ask me more!
On Wednesday 5th of December I gave my yearly lecture to the post-graduate students of the Ghent University specializing in Advanced Marketing Research. (For their events, see the MMA posts).
Before the more hands-on section on the do's and don't of online (quantitative) market-research I presented in short what the future of market research may bring us and how it may re-shape the future of how we collect research data.
This section turned out to trigger a lot of attention in the class room and since I only managed to scrape the surface I herewith add two slide sets that I used in early 2006 during the GOR conference in Germany.
The first part is about Bluetooth and 3G phone applications for Market Research, part two addresses RFID in market research.
I came across Pete Comley's recent post on Virtual Survey's Blog. He explains how his recent affair with his latest gadget, his iPhone, envisioned him on how the future of mobile research may look like. This is basically what he claims:
"...There is an amazing amount of hype out there about the iPhone – but unlike most techie hype, most of this is true. This is the phone that will make you leave your existing relationships behind and seek pastures new and you’ll never go back to those complicated menus and unreadable postage stamp screens. I believe it will also shape the way all mobile communications will develop in the future and this, in turn, will have implications for market research. Gone are the days of SMS surveys and trying to download Java applets onto reluctant phones. Gone, also, will be the limitation of people having to do web surveys only on their PC. Instead, people will be able to do fully featured web-like surveys on their phone, on the move, just like I’m typing this document now, on the train..."
Pete is so right about how this may change the way the actual survey interfaces will change!
But if we just think a bit further on how this may impact our industry, let’s just remember that a future version of the iPhone will most definitively be a transmitter for the Global Positioning System (GPS). This will offer researchers the opportunity to exploit the user’s physical location and link this to mobile survey data. This will than offer researchers an opportunity to conduct “point of exposure” data collection centred on event tracking: Track the respondent's proximity to outdoor advertising, allowing effectiveness research, probing for recall, etc. The accuracy and precision will only become much greater in the next few years.
Just look at the picture below: a respondent with a future iPhone (with GPS transmission) is part of a research panel.
He agreed that his data may be tracked by the Research Company. The research firm is doing an outdoor advertising awareness study an the survey will run on the iPhone. As researchers we'll now be able to track the awareness of billboards and combine it with the actual behaviour of the panellists: so in the case below, we can now conclude that despite the fact that the survey data shows that this panellist does not recall having seen the message on the billboard, we do know that he had an opportunity to see it, since he actually passed by the billboard!
So to conclude the future of market research will undoubtedly bring a new reality: Here is Pete Comley's full post...
