Which Custom Panel is Right for You: Branded Customer Community or Blind Specialty Panel?

A custom online panel is an invaluable source of information, ideas, and insight. And Ipsos has been a leader in developing, building and maintaining custom panels for many of our clients. If you are considering building your own custom panel, is it better to be branded or better to be blinded?

First, you need to have a better understanding of the structural nuances of custom panels before making the investment to build one. This first step is crucial. The result is you'll be choosing the best option for your needs and truly get a cheaper, faster, and better solution that meets your research goals.

Depending on your research objectives, you'll want to consider either a branded customer community panel or a blind specialty panel. Each has its advantages and your research needs will determine which would be the better option. And let's not overlook the potential of a research strategy involving both types of panels, which could offer the 360176 view of the market that you need.

Custom Panel Advantages

By and large, all custom panels have the benefit of offering a pre-screened sample to marketers wishing to do research on an ongoing basis with a dedicated group of respondents. When coupled with new and innovative online technologies, the solution gives you an opportunity to launch surveys and get back data within hours -- a much faster turnaround process than traditional online research.

A custom panel solution can also be much less expensive since the one-time cost of recruiting the panel is amortized over many studies throughout the year. This significantly reduces the cost on an annual basis as compared to running the same studies using a traditional access panel. These points alone are an excellent reason why the investment in a proprietary panel could be the right decision for your company.

That being so, there are other factors to consider in the panel debate -- factors that may have significant impact on cost in the long run.

Branded or Blinded?

Once you've made the move to build a custom panel, the question then becomes to brand the panel or not to brand. There are benefits to both, but the decision will depend on what your specific research needs are and how you plan on using your custom panel. Let's summarize what each has to offer and some of the inherent challenges.

Branded customer community panels:

• Can act as an extension of the relationship your brand has with customers and are a good way to bring research and marketing activities closer together.
• Recruitment sample sources can be customer lists or company websites, which are often very cost-effective and, in part, use existing brand value to engage participants.
• Panelist will have affinity with your brand and therefore, extrinsic incentives such as sweepstakes and prizes can be smaller because panelists have more intrinsic rewards from their participation.
• There is no minimum size required for the panel; it can be as small as 50, which forms more of a `community' feel with mostly qualitative research, or as high as 25,000 or more where quantitative research is more predominant.
• Great for content generation and customer-service related business decisions - One of our clients has been able to save over $100,000 by asking customers what product features matter most to them.
• You can test advertising and new product ideas, including images, audio, and video.
• Despite the fact that generally attrition rates tend to be lower on branded panels, you also need to give more consideration to panelist engagement because the panel will be part of your public image.
• Special care needs to be given to panelist questions and concerns as they are not only research respondents, but more importantly, they are your clients and customers.
• Often, branded panels are biased toward avid, loyal customers since lapsed or occasional customers are less likely to join the panel. While this sample imbalance is something you should keep in mind, it is not necessarily a bad thing because often you need or should be doing research with your best customers.
• Alternatively, when recruiting, efforts can be made to mitigate the 'best customer' bias by, for example, placing quotas on lapsed or occasional vs. frequent customers during the initial qualification survey. Also, Ipsos' IAF software can track customer groups as they move from frequent to lapsed, providing you with valuable insights as to why they've lapsed.

Blind specialty panels:

• A good opportunity to get a quick read on competitive positioning of your brand among customers and non-customers.
• Allow you to learn about attitudes towards category and discover trends and purchase decision influencers over time.
• Because they are recruited from outside sources and balanced to include customers and non-customers, they are a more representative read of the market, but can be more costly to recruit and maintain.
• Engaging panelists through a variety of intrinsic (e.g. sharing results of studies) and extrinsic (e.g. prizes and contests) rewards is important for maintaining the panel as attrition tends to be higher for blind panels.
• Blind panels tend to be larger depending on your minimum sample size and sub-group requirements; for example, if your panel includes a niche target group that you would like to survey on a regular basis with a minimum sample size of 300 responses, assuming an average response rate of 30%, your panel will need to include at least 1000 panelists from the niche target.
• If your research need is best met with a blind panel, you should consider existing online access panels, including Ipsos' Canadian and US i-Say panels. Often this presents a more cost-effective solution if you don't plan on doing frequent or on-going research with your target group.

In the end, the choice is yours. Carefully weighing your budget constraints, your information and research needs, and your overall marketing objectives will help you make the wisest decision. And of course, you can always speak with an Ipsos research and panel expert to explain the benefits that each type of custom panel offers, assess your strategies, and develop a solution that best suits your objectives.