News

Online Dancing

By Steven Shaw

It's 5.30pm and, after a long day, the kids are screaming for Monsters Inc and the cat is under your feet demanding food. On the stove, there's oil burning in the pan, and the rice has become a solid lump of goop. And now the telephone rings. It's someone doing a survey. You instantly become one of the thousands of Kiwis who now routinely tell researchers to go forth and procreate. Steven Shaw reports on new strategies to produce credible surveys.

Tolerance for phone and door-to-door research is not what it used to be. Many people consider it rude beyond belief. But research has a saviour. And that saviour is the online space.

Forums, permission-based emails and online panels (a group of people that has been recruited and can be contacted for research purposes) are rapidly growing in New Zealand.

SmileCity, a leading NZ online loyalty programme with a research panel of 100,000 members, now supports researcher TNS in online polling. "I remember signing the contract two and a half years ago and thinking, I hope this works," says TNS NZ md Murray Campbell. "There was an element of risk but certainly that risk has paid off rather nicely now.

"New Zealanders are opting in faster than we dared hope," he says. "Because of the features of the internet, and the fact that around 65% of NZ households are online, we have the potential to select from a huge group and engage interactively. We can quickly assess the look of advertising, product packaging and products among a diversity of New Zealanders - not to mention surveying them for opinions and perceptions. It's lending clarity and precision to what organisations understand about perceptions of their products and services."

SmileCity members sign up for free and agree to receive emails asking them to participate in surveys. The incentive is that points are won and redeemed for cash, charity donations or purchases with more than 60 online shopping partners. Members are free to opt out at any time. TNS's last election-week poll for TV3 (using the SmileCity panel) was closest of all the polls to the actual result.

"The 100,000 member panel strongly represents the New Zealand online population by age, sex, ethnicity and socio-economics," says Campbell. Members of this 'virtual city' include the hardest-to-reach individuals, who engage readily with the web. "Notoriously hard-to-find consumers such as young males, and young Asian males are members of SmileCity," says Campbell. "They are now willingly participating in research."

Campbell says that many people now use email or text as their major form of communication. "It's a fundamental switch in the way we're living," he says. "This form of research is directly in synch with that change."

TNS also has the option to sell access to a SmileCity panel to other research companies. Myles George from Focus Research (which works with clients like BNZ, Telecom, Frucor and TVNZ) says they have used SmileCity as an outsourced panel. "SmileCity doesn't necessarily offer us research as such - but provides the contact with consumers.

"The size of the panel gives us a lot more comfort," says George. "With 100,000 people on their panels, you can drill down into quite specific groups. The use of consumer panels is massive overseas and quite common practice. It's inevitable that it will become a major force in quantitative research."

Murray Campbell says it is important that SmileCity is a managed panel rather than a stock list of email addresses. "We do quite a lot of gauging and reviews. We limit the amount of surveys they can do on a certain category over a given amount of time - so they can't become a professional correspondent. We also review how they fill in a particular questionnaire - we know how long it should take to complete and if they're doing it in a quarter of the time, we know they're not seriously considering the answers."

18 Ltd has been conducting online research with the youth market since September 2002 and has worked for clients such as Vodafone, McDonald's, ASB, XBOX and Masterfoods. General manager Spencer Willis says their online research tool at www.18tracker.com is purely focused on the youth of NZ.

"We have a corporate serious research-based face with methodologies and structure behind it," he says. "Then there's the kid's face we have with 18 Tracker, which says to kids, 'have your say'. Once you build that you start building some honest and integrity with the kids. From research point of view that's slightly easier to do online than in a focus group."

Willis says that in 18's early days, they faced many arguments about the validity of online research compared to traditional methods. "As one of the first companies to really embrace the online medium as an effective research tool we have faced the skeptics and watched them go from worrying about sample size relevancy to adopting the strategy themselves and becoming advocates.

"We have always said that online has its place, especially amongst the youth demographic but the traditional methods are still relevant today and our work is currently split 50/50."

When a person registers with at 18tracker.com, their personal profile determines what sort of surveys come up on their screen, thus targeting the survey to the viewer. As the results feed into the back end, the client gets to see the results in real time and can sort the results in different ways if they wish. "That's the biggest advantage with this way of doing research," says Willis. "They can see where their spend is going, and it avoids the problems associated with interpretation and delivery.

"You get a hell of a lot of honesty from online," he says, "because there's no pressure. In a focus group for example, if you have two girls from Remuera and four girls from a not so affluent area, they may have completely different opinions and it can change the dynamic of the group.

"If you have an alpha male in the group it can completely ruin the skew. That poor kid sitting in the corner may be quiet but he does have a valid opinion and he is an important consumer."

Online may provide a lot of answers, but it's not a cure-all. "There's not one fast rule for finding insight. People are starting to dabble a lot more in online because consumers almost expect it. They don't want to sit down and fill out a survey. The phone thing I find fascinating, especially when I'm at the receiving end of it. People say that online you can have an online persona: it's na�ve to think that it's just online. There's always that margin of error across all mediums."

Do focus groups just tell you what you want to hear? Willis says it comes down to having a very good moderator. "We still employ focus groups as a strategy - there are still things you need to understand that you can't get online.

"You need to be able to visually see the reaction to a question or the emotion when they touch a product or see something for the first time. There is a place. When we first started, people thought we were trying to say online is the only way to do research. There are some questions we study for clients where there's no point in doing it online; we'll just get opinion and some data when we need to see some emotion.

"You do get emotion online, but the old adage hasn't changed: Research needs to get out of the office."

James Armstrong at Colmar Brunton says they're also doing an increasing amount of surveys in the online space, both at Colmar Brunton and with their field company, Consumerlink. "We're investing heavily into online panels and recruiting into online panels," he says.

Online has taken a bit longer to get off the ground in NZ compared to the US. "New Zealand tends to follow the UK or European model which in turn has been slower than the US," says Armstrong. "Phone will never go away in the same way that door-to-door surveys still happen here - albeit in less volume than they were. Telephone and online will co-exist depending on the situation for which they're required.

"The way we're doing it is recruiting panels that are population-proportionate - within the internet space of course. There's no such thing yet as an internet panel that's totally representative of the population because the internet doesn't have 100% penetration. We have a panel here recruited off the back of our ongoing telephone surveys. That panel is constructed and balanced in such a way that it is as representative of in-home usage of internet as it can be."

Gary Martin at ACNielsen says recruiting for their panel (at www.yourvoice.net) is through a range of sources. A high proportion is recruited offline. "If you only recruit online you end up with a panel of heavy internet users. Depending on what you're doing, your sample can come from a range of sources. If we're doing an evaluation on a client's website we might use a pop-up questionnaire. We also do customer satisfaction work - a client may give us their customer database and we'll send out emails. It's still online, but it's not an online panel. There's also the bulletin board approach - as far as online goes, the panel approach is just one method."

Jo Dipnall from online research company CogNETive Melbourne is not a huge fan of online panels. "They have to be really clear; you have to know how it's recruited, and how often they are contacted. A lot of studies we do are customer-based."

While Dipnall says there's a lot of "crappy" online surveys out there, she also believes online can be "fantastic", especially with the capacity for open-ended replies. "They say what they think and you don't get that with the phone because you get interviewer bias creeping in."

Dipnall says it's hard these days to cut through the clutter. "People get so many calls each day from charities and other organisations. Online is very powerful but it has to be done right. People think it's a different kettle of fish, but it's not. The same rules have to apply, of representativeness and respect for the respondent. And we have to keep them engaged."

Online plusses

• Communication is based upon interaction with willing participants, rather than reluctant respondents.
• Visual stimulus can be used, including TV images.
• Fast initial concept screening, including proposed packaging, presentation, offers etc.
• Open-ended questions can be used, so responses contain information and emotion.
• Hard to reach audiences (such as young males) can be readily accessed.
• Surveys tend to be shorter online; people prefer shorter (but the longer the surveys are, the more points members receive).
• Respondents can answer whenever they wish, and in their own time.