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An Internet Tour for Market Research

Copyright 1998-2005 by Nigel Bradley, University of Westminster

Cite as: Bradley N (2005) An Internet Tour for Market Research. ESOMAR Newsbrief Vol6 No.4 April 1998 pp12-13

Available at http://www.wmin.ac.uk/marketingresearch/Marketing/mrtour.htm   Revised version

The Internet has some useful tools for the market researcher, this article examines a selection of these tools. The tour makes a few observations on secondary and primary data collection and looks at sources of up to date information on the subject of marketing research.

Some Tools

There are hundreds of search engines available to internet users. The user simply types in one or more key words for documents worldwide to be scanned. The most "relevant" documents are displayed within seconds. Two very fast search engines are GOOGLE and  TEOMA. METACRAWLER is a compendium of most search engines, each differing in some respect. The results of any search can reveal documents with numerous pages, making it almost impossible to find the original keyword. This problem is easily resolved by narrowing the initial search. GOOGLE has created a new service called GOOGLE SUGGEST which helps to direct searches more accurately. Should you be confronted with numerous results use the "Edit" on your browser, then going to "Find in page".

If you are searching for something it is likely that someone has already been there! Take this thought one step further: they may have created a web page of links to appropriate sites, so a quick search strategy is to type the keyword with the word links into any search engine. For example survey links or marketing links or qualitative research links will give sites that have been carefully sorted and put onto the web as a sort of amateur directory.

Alta Vista is one of the oldest search engines and was one of the first to carry a useful language translation device. Any web page or e-mail message can be put through the device and can provide an almost instant translation. Moreover the device can be used for other documents. Your proposal, questionnaire, report can be translated here quickly. It is not totally accurate, but an excellent beginning, and of course at no cost. Another choice is INTERTRAN  and there is also FREETRANSLATION.

Multi-country studies almost always require a massive currency conversion task. At various sites exchange rate converters are available. An example is the Universal Currency Converter at http://www.xe.net/currency/.

Sample size estimation and significance testing has traditionally been a tedious task made easier by such devices as tables, nomograms and programmed calculators. Several web-site owners have "sponsored" on-line tools to help. Examples are on http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm and also http://www.researchinfo.com/docs/calculators/index.cfm  Bill Trochim's academic site http://www.socialresearchmethods.net  makes selecting statistics exciting, and Lancaster University provides an entire statistics text-book over the internet at http://www.cas.lancs.ac.uk/glossary_v1.1/samp.htmll.

The Question Bank is a web site full of questionnaires used on major surveys in the United Kingdom. Useful to identify major projects, but also to see standard questionnaires developed by people who know what they are doing! See http://qb.soc.surrey.ac.uk   

There are several marketing discussion groups on the internet, but on the world wide web the Marketing Research Roundtable is a site worth bookmarking as a favourite. It is a collection of questions and answers about topics of interest to all. It is a sister page to the "Peer Poll" which asks this pre-selected sample [of internet users interested in marketing research who have reached the page] various questions. Such questions concern whether the internet will affect other data collection sources, and how. (See MR roundtable )  

The internet is likely to revolutionise the reporting phase of market research. Already the web carries results from numerous government studies. It offers a fast, cheap and efficient method to deliver information. Increasingly multi-national companies and market research institutes are using the medium to deliver results. Several software providers are offering tailor-made packages to accommodate demand in this area. For a demonstration of this emerging novelty, and a list of MR users visit www.e-tabs.com

Secondary Data Sources

Sources of published data are numerous. The European Union site for example carries a mass of data, including the full reports of the Eurobarometer studies (see http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/dg10/infcom/epo/polls.html). American sources of interest include the US Census Bureau at http://www.census.gov/ and the CIA World factbook at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

ClickZ has collated surveys of web-users, in an attempt to determine the number of people on-line. Their site gives a useful table of connections by country. Original sources can be reached easily. http://www.clickz.com/stats/web_worldwide

Moving from the internet audience to traditional media, several sites exemplify the current status of web-publishing. Firstly the British National Readership Survey site shows top-line results (at http://www.nrs.co.uk) as does the Audit Bureau of Circulations (at http://www.abc.org.uk/). And of course parallel offerings are available from other countries, for example Italian media studies (at http://www.bilink.it/bilink/mscene/mscene.htm) or American studies at http://www.mediamark.com  Other useful resources include the largest index of World Newspapers (at http://www.onlinenewspapers.com)and the Newsweek Media Research Index, a compilation of media research abstracts, this is an essential site for media researchers. (see http://www.vmr.com/research/index.html).

The Internet can easily provide a full education in marketing and marketing research. A standard marketing text-book has a sister web-site provided by the University of Ulster and Houghton Mifflin .  Another site has a succinct description of how to conduct surveys (http://www.surveysystem.com/sdesign.htm). Additionally, the web has numerous marketing-related journals. Journal publishers may just list contents, they may reproduce abstracts, in some cases entire articles, and increasingly journals are being published on the net. Relevant journals have been identified by Tilburg University in the Netherlands and can be accessed HERE.

Associations such as ESOMAR are the life-blood of marketing research, and most have their own site. A useful list of links to these is available at http://www.mrweb.com/ . The Research Buyer's Guide is a directory of market research providers and support services in the UK & Ireland see http://www.rbg.org.uk   Similarly, listings of research agency sites can be found at various places such as http://www.worldopinion.com/directory.qry.

Questionnaires

To date primary research conducted on the internet has been to evaluate web-sites, to examine employee satisfaction, and to survey specific target groups. Despite the challenging sampling tasks, internet-questionnaire writing is becoming a study in its own right. Questionnaires can be interactive or static; in colour or not; with/out edit checks; with/out filters; closed or open; with radio buttons or check boxes; questions can be rotated; script can be single page scroll or multiple page. The following sites show a selection of questionnaires that illustrate these different facilities.

What is your VALS type? This is a black and white survey showing how the single-scroll page works http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/presurvey.shtml Other demonstrations on the other hand show full colour capability and the benefits of single questions per page see these "Do It Yourself Wizards" on the web:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/    SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily.

http://www.zoomerang.com  Zoomerang allows businesses and individuals to easily conduct professional-grade surveys and gather and analyze the critical feedback necessary to make important decisions

http://www.zipsurvey.com    ZipSurvey™ online survey software by CorporateSurvey.com is a web-hosted survey application developed for anyone interested in creating online surveys quickly and affordably.

http://web-online-surveys.com    Web Surveys is a do-it-yourself, easy-to-use survey solution.

Multiple choice questions lend themselves to the net and a Marketing Research Quiz can be found at http://www.busmgt.ulst.ac.uk/h_mifflin/. Similarly a publisher has posted a popular game to Test Your Marketing IQ!, which shows the power of interactive interviewing (http://www.copernicusmarketing.com/).

Finally, a choice of MR Panels is presented at the Volition site. Here anyone can sign up to be a respondent. (http://www.volition.com/opinions.html)

The internet offers the researcher a rich store of resources which can assist each stage of the market research process. For some, the major barrier to using such resources is not knowing how to find them.