Online Research: Gearing up a New Vision
Worldwide online research revenue grew by 23% in 2005 -- growth far from moderate, which cannot but reinforce the bright prospects specialists hold for the market research industry as a whole and/or for the online sector in particular.
This is a phenomenon of unwaveringly positive effects for online market research's image. Whether this is a sign of expansion for the entire industry or a symptom of the aggressive shift towards online expected to occur in the market research technology paradigm, such growth is actually big enough to account for listing the online method among the foremost well-established technologies for conducting research.
Today, the advantages of online market research seem compelling. However, as appealing as they may be, assets such as efficiency, cost effectiveness, access to hard-to-reach targets, respondents' convenience, and ever-more sophisticated online reporting tools are not the cornerstone of the pro-online argument. Rather subtly, on judging the role online research plays in the industry, one needs to turn diachronic and operate distinctions at a much finer level, where research tools are subject to constant changes, in order to fit the constantly changing researched material.
By making extensive use of panels, online research has become quite an accurate mirror of a globalized and cross-culturally segmented world.
Indeed, it takes a good bird's eye view of today's market, doubled by accurate insights into its dynamics, pre-eminent trends, and whereabouts to acknowledge the increasingly bigger role of online in market research. Equally governed by the principles of globalization and segmentation, the market is increasingly turning into one of multinationals with global targets made up of unique individuals.
Where do nationally representative samples come into play in a market of targeted segments?
Ours is a world of cross-culturally shared experience and global communities. With horizontal views increasingly turning vertical, we are having a differently layered piece of the cake. In their introducing or establishing a brand, marketers are increasingly looking at shared experience rather than cultural touchstones. And where the whole perception of the world is changing, along with its shibboleths, market research itself must find new angles of looking at the world and prototype new ways of doing things.
Once admitting that samples of targeted segments will soon be in higher demand than nationally representative samples, researchers will also have to admit that online is the handiest approach to take. By making extensive use of panels, online research has become quite an accurate mirror of a globalized and cross-culturally segmented world. In fact, in containing large quantities of updated information about its panellists, each online access panel is a bunch of sub-panels, thereby enabling the online researcher to build robust samples and access hard-to-reach populations. Availability of low incidence targets for reasonable prices is more than a major asset of online market research; it is the very point recommending the online technology as the fittest.
Not to even mention that the cost of screening for low incidence populations can, in many cases, be far higher than the cost of the main stage of research, making it extremely costly, if not impossible, for many clients to carry out market research.
Worth reminding, however, is that online research is less a matter of switching old projects from offline to online and more a matter of developing ways of conducting research that is impossible to do offline. While usage and attitude (U&A) surveys, pre-tests and tracking studies, and customer and client satisfaction programs are increasingly moving to online, examples of products like Emoti*Trace -- able to offer a detailed output of a respondent's ad-generated emotions by their moving in it in real-time -- would count as a good argument for the online medium enabling solutions that would never have been possible offline.
However, the key to using panels as a methodology as well as the quality of our access panels depends on the extent to which we commit ourselves to maintaining them.The standards being established today by important players in the industry will only yield high-quality panels if applied throughout the process; that is, according to the quality standards derived from the ESOMAR guidelines with respect to online surveys. It is only by quality access panels that online market research -- the truly accurate image of our globalized and cross-culturally segmented world -- can indeed qualify as the right research method of our times.
If you would like to learn more about Canadian and U.S. online research panels, contact Joe Giacobbe. For world-wide inquiries, please contact Andrei Postoaca.
