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By
focusing solely on market research fieldwork we intimately understand
the area like no other; this makes our data collection capabilities
comparable with only the best for quality, usefulness and timeliness.
The hard facts;
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Interviewers in every capital city and most
regional areas
Specialist focus group recruitment services
Fully fledged in-house Web surveying capability
Full internal data analysis, processing and coding
Lists, panels and sample analysis capabilities all
competitively priced
"AFS services 6 of the Top 10 Market Research Firms in
Australia."
Great
fieldwork is the cornerstone of accurate
research. AFS has been developing its unique approach for over 10
years. Our confidence comes from proving to be indispensable, time and
again, to some of the largest research clients in the country.
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Latest Expert Feature from AFS
Audience Smarts
Strategic Sample Tracking =
Continuous High Values Insights
Summary
Upheaval. Revolution.
Transformation. Change.
We know that significant change is occurring (financial crisis, green
preferences, new media niches), what we don’t know is the quantum
of the impact and the timing of it on the brands we represent.
The simple world of supermarkets and Neilson is gone forever.
What’s a marketing executive to do? How can she keep track of the
effects of marketing actions? The answer is to track a Strategic
Sample. This investigation explores the details of a
straightforward approach.
In
contrast to answering a specific research question, tracking customers,
employees, defecting customers and prospective customers has
fundamental strategic benefits. They deliver a specific
information flow on market effects; the cosmic confusion of changing
media, changing technology, and changing competitive forces. They
are an essential investment for your client to have and smart business
for researchers to initiate.
Importance
Tracking
a Strategic Sample of consumer awareness, perceptions, and behaviour
delivers essential marketing intelligence to help guide marketers
through the turbulence and helter-skelter of rapid changes in marketing
technology, media, and distribution channels. The ultimate goal of
marketing is to influence and control the ultimate consumer. Therefore,
if the perceptions, attitudes and behavior of that ultimate consumer
are monitored over time, we will know if the cumulative force of all
marketing activities is influencing the ultimate consumer. If
we track consistently, it is possible to monitor the effects of
specific marketing programs as they are introduced. Contrast
these outcomes against not tracking at all.
Tracking
a Strategic Sample answers a number of important questions:
- How is your brand’s
awareness trending over time, relative to competition? Awareness is the
single most important marketing variable in many product categories.
- How is your brand’s
image evolving over time? Think of “image” as the character
or personality of a brand’s awareness. The strategic management
of brand image is one of the most important goals of marketing.
- What advertising messages
do your consumers remember about your brand, and how do these messages
change over time? Advertising messages tend to undergo learning and
memory “distortion” as they are interpreted and remembered
by consumers. Therefore, the only way to know for sure your
communication impact is to track advertising message recall.
- What variables define
your optimum target market? Who are your brand’s heavy users,
nonusers, light users? The identification and monitoring of your
brand’s optimum target market is one of the easily calculated
outputs of good tracking research. What are the demographics (and the
correlates) that define the optimal target market for your brand? Which
market segments should you focus upon?
- What impact are your
competitors having in the marketplace, and how are competitive
activities influencing your brand? Overreaction and underreaction to
competitive initiatives historically constitute some of the greatest
marketing mistakes. It’s really important to know, as early as
possible, whether a new competitive product or new competitive
advertising campaign is a real threat, or just smoke and vapors. Good
tracking research allows you to monitor and assess competitive
threats—before it’s too late to react.
Fundamentals of Sampling
If you should decide to pursue Strategic Sample tracking research for
your brands, here are some suggestions to keep in mind. Tracking
research, like everything else, can be good or bad depending upon how
you design and execute it.
- Telephone surveys are
typically the best way to track awareness, image, and advertising
message recall. These telephone surveys
can be continuous (i.e., conducted every month) or pulsed (conducted at
a point in time, such as the last week of each quarter). Tracking that
requires imagery can be integrated using the web.
- Strategic Sampling
Quality is essential. The greatest (and often
least visible) mistakes in tracking research are usually sampling
errors. The sampling plan and management of the sample are absolutely
crucial to consistently accurate tracking data. The samples from month
to month and year to year must be identical in every way or else the
resulting data will not be comparable. Here are some common sampling
errors to avoid:
- Sample definition too
narrow. If your target audience
is females aged 21 to 29, that’s fine for guiding media
placement. All too often, however, the target audience becomes the
specification for the sampling plan for tracking. Therefore, only
females 21 to 29 are interviewed in the tracking research. Suppose your
advertising turns out to be really effective among women 34 to 54
instead of women 21 to 29. You might have cancelled a very effective
campaign because it appeared to be failing among the target audience.
Also, it’s possible your advertising is working among 21- to
29-year-olds, but driving all other age groups away. If we were only
sampling the 21 to 29 segment, we would have overlooked this critical
failing.
Remember, always define the sample for tracking research very broadly
and inclusively. The purpose of tracking is to tell us what’s
happening in the marketplace, and a too-narrow sample almost always
defeats this objective.
- Variable definition of
sample. Never allow the things
you want to measure to be a part of the screening criteria that admits
someone into the survey. For example, you would never want awareness of
a product category or awareness of a brand to be part of the screening
criteria for a tracking survey if one of the purposes of the tracking
research is to measure awareness. Likewise, you would never want
“past 30 day usage” of a category or brand to be a part of
the sampling criteria, if the purpose of the study is to measure
changes in usage over time. Awareness and product usage are variables
that can change as a result of your marketing activities or competitive
initiatives, and that can change from season to season. As these
variables change, they can change the composition of the tracking
sample and destroy the comparability of the survey data across time.
- Sampling without
replacement. If the universe is
limited (say you are tracking attitudes among your 1000 dealers), and
you take dealers out of the sample as they are interviewed, then the
composition of your sample is gradually changing as interviewing
progresses—and this makes the interviews from one time period
incomparable to interviews in another time period.
Remember, if the universe is small and limited, then sample with
replacement. That is, once a respondent is interviewed, put that
respondent back into the sample for the next wave of interviewing (or
if you must, quarantine them for only a short period). An alternative
solution is to divide the original sample into discrete, matched
sub-samples, and then use one of these-sub samples for each subsequent
wave of interviewing.
- Randomize sample within
quota groups. Even though most
projects begin with a random sample, things can happen which destroy
randomness. For example, most samples are organized by geography.
As a final quality-control procedure, always randomise the final
sample within each quota group. Then, no matter how the sample is
worked, you will end up with a random sample.
- Limit sample to force
callbacks. The research company
must limit the size of the original sample, so that the callback cycle
is properly triggered. If too many telephone numbers are put in the
initial sample, then it is likely that no callbacks will ever be made.
The study is completed before the interviewers ever work through the
original sample. The recommended policy is to release 70% of the
planned sample, and then gradually introduce the remaining 30% of the
sample as the callback cycle is completed on the initial sample.
Typically, a primary number in the sample should receive a minimum
total of three calls (an original call and two callbacks). AFS is
often asked to make six calls.
- The questionnaire must
remain the same from month to month and year to year. Changes in the
questionnaire (even something as seemingly innocent as a change in
question order) can create unexpected changes in the results. Simply
changing one word in a question can change the results. Therefore, keep
the questionnaire constant over time. If you want to modify, add, or
delete questions in a tracking study, do it toward the end of the
questionnaire—so that the changes will not distort the key
measures in the first 80% of the questionnaire.
- All interviewing
procedures and controls must remain constant over time. Changes in the minutia
of training, scheduling, monitoring, and supervising interviewers can
inject unplanned changes in tracking study results. The briefing and
training instructions for each specific tracking study must remain
unchanged over time.
- Editing, coding, data
cleaning, and tabulation must remain constant over time. Changes in the way
“no answers” or “blanks” are handled, changes
in how many multiple responses are accepted, and a hundred other
“minor” tabulation details can change tracking results over
time.
A great long-term threat
to the accuracy and integrity of a strategic tracking study is gradualism. That is,
small incremental changes in methods and procedures accumulate over
time and gradually destroy the comparability of the tracking data. For
ongoing tracking studies, it is recommended that monthly meetings be
held with everyone in operations working on the project, to review and
reinforce exactly how the study is to be executed. Likewise, specific
quality-control guidelines and standards must be developed and
maintained for each long-term tracking project.
Needless
to say, once you choose a research company to do a tracking project,
you should stick with that one company (unless that company’s
performance is unsatisfactory). Changing research companies every year
or two on a long-term project almost always guarantees that the data
will not be comparable.
The
true strategic value of tracking research is fully realised only after
several years of consistent measurement of your ultimate consumers.
Several years of longitudinal data really tell a story, but it’s a strategic story, a
grand panorama of your performance in the marketplace compared to your
competitors, as played out during the different phases of the business
cycle. With this strategic road map, it is possible to plot strategy,
and monitor your successes and failures in pursuing that strategy,
regardless of the day-to-day confusion and chaos in the quicksand world
of upheaval, revolution, and transformation.
A Challenge for Now - I
As
the New Year dawns, you have the chance to leverage off past work
– what was once a stable environment is now on the cusp of
potentially wild change. This may have the impact of invalidating
important past work and subsequent strategic decisions made by your
clients. Turning past projects into repeat or tracking projects
can be a low input, high value, avenue to pursue.
Can
you see the value in repeating past projects? From a data collection
view they are less expensive to run (AFS can guarantee this, just ask
– Ed.) they fit the strategic mould known to you and your client
(report formats, paradigms) and lead to further client
consultation/deeper strategic interaction.
A
Challenge for Now - II
Given
the value that Strategic Sample Tracking delivers, consider how you can
develop Strategic Samples for you and your clients to monitor.
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