When Philips Lighting wanted an opinion survey of Europe's hospital workers who worked in rooms without a window, it turned to an innovative market research company called Brainjuicer. When Brainjuicer wants to find groups of consumers that normally can't be found, it turns to the internet.
'Nowadays, 64% of the population is online and every slice of the population is represented in that 64%,' says John Kearon, CEO of market research company, Brainjuicer.
The juice that Kearon squeezes from the online population is cheap, effective, highly-targeted market research. Ten years ago, market research on the internet was in its infancy. Today, it accounts for about 25% of the global industry, according to market research consultancy GMI. Nine out of 10 large companies and six out of 10 small companies will do online research in 2007, a global market worth around ££2bn.
Reaching out
At its best, online research is popular because it gives researchers cut-price access to hard-to-find groups: not just hospital workers without daylight, but special interest groups or niches that don't tend to respond to traditional methods of research. Teenagers and young adults, for example, are tomorrow's customers, but are resistant to normal methods of market research. They won't fill in questionnaires or hang around on the phone answering questions about their lifestyle. On the other hand, they will give their opinions in internet discussion groups and social networking sites. They generally don't respond to advertising and marketing concepts in focus groups, but they will rate video clips. 'It wasn't possible to study these groups properly before,' says Kearon. 'Now, the research can be more interactive and creative. You can play a video, or design questions that help them express what they think and feel in a much smarter way.'
Internet-based market research is also useful because, instead of a once-a-year blockbuster research project, companies can tap into customer opinions regularly, or do a simple survey to help steer their decision-making at a very early stage of product design. Kearon says the internet is ideal as a way to dip a toe, to test ideas when you don't need in-depth research. 'For instance,' he says, 'we help start-ups find out if their idea is any good.'
But the internet has created plenty of shoddy market research. Anyone who uses the internet today is bombarded with opportunities to participate in surveys or even to join online consumer panels and be paid to answer questions from companies that care less about who you are, or the quality of the opinion expressed, and more about getting the number of replies that their client has asked for. Charles Pearson at Research Now, explains how he registered for a rival company's paid panel on the internet: 'They don't even say you need to live in a particular place or be a certain age to participate. I was offered five opportunities to participate immediately.' The incentive to make up answers or simply to fill in random responses on this type of panel has created many 'professional respondents' - consumers who will say anything in an online survey, as long as they get paid.
Acceptable standards
Good agencies that care about their reputation are trying to weed out the professional respondents, but not all of them. Eric Salama, the chief executive of Kantar, the market research division of WPP, admits that standards of internet research have often been unacceptable. 'A lot of internet research today has standards that we shouldn't be proud of. These are standards that we wouldn't apply in other fieldwork areas.' The problem when you're buying research is that you simply get statistics and conclusions - misleading research looks exactly the same as good research, until you put it into practice.
The Market Research Society, the UK's industry watchdog, advises companies buying research to use only its members. It's also wise not to rely exclusively on the internet, or to assume it will solve every problem. For example, when Rachel Lopata, research director at Opinion Leader Research, was surveying chief executives online, she eventually discovered that many of the surveys were filled in by their PAs. 'Although online research can be useful,' she says, 'it's not always the answer.'
Tim Phillips is a freelance technology journalist
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