The Future Place Blog

Synovate to Use GMI Panels

The trend towards research companies using third-party panels, rather than in-house panels, has taken a major step forwards with the announcement that Synovate has signed a deal with GMI to use their panels for global research.

Synovate does have in-house panels and will continue to use and possibly develop them. But it is clear that the global focus will be via the GMI panel.

The shift towards third-party panels is a fundamental shift in the way market research organisations conduct business. Traditionally, research agencies tended to have their own face-to-face interviewers and CATI centres. The cost model that agencies used was based on a large part of their profits coming from their fieldwork operations. One of the big advantages of the large, multi-national agencies was that they could offer quality fieldwork in a wide range of countries.

In the brave new world, where most agencies will share the same fieldwork suppliers (the online panels) the profit made from fieldwork will tend to decline and become consistent across agencies. The barriers to entry will tend to drop when small, medium-sized and large agencies are all sharing the same online access panels.

The story is covered by MrWeb and on GMI’s website.

Identifying the lead

I am currently reading a really interesting book called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath (if you have not read it then I strongly recommend it). In they book they re-tell a great story by Nora Ephron (screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle).

The story is as follows (see note) :
To illustrate the point of how important it is to find the beginning of the story, she told us a story about her first exposure to journalism, as a high school junior in Beverly Hills, California. The high school journalism teacher gave the students a story and asked them to rewrite it.
The story went something like this: On Thursday, December 3, the entire faculty from the Beverly Hills High School will travel to Sacramento to meet with Racquel Welch, Wilt ‘the stilt’ Chamberlain and the governor for an all day conference on the future of secondary school education.
He wrote on the blackboard Who? What? Why? Where? When? The students all scribbled in the their spiral notebooks something like this:
The governor, Racquel Welch, and Wilt ‘the stilt’ Chamberlain will meet with high school teachers from Beverly Hills High School on December 3 to discuss the future of secondary school education.
The teacher raised his hands passionately and said, You all missed the point! What is the point? The lead of the story is “There will be no school on Thursday!”

WOW! As soon as I read this I realised that here was a beautiful way of encapsulating what a market research de-brief should be. Most researchers are striving to put the narrative into the presentation, but I think this story emphasises the need to ensure we have the right lead. We often talk about the data (our version of the 5 Ws, the Who, What, Why, Where, and When) and then right at the end, if we are good, we deliver the core message. In Ephron’s example the core message was not contained in the 5 Ws, the core message, for the relevant audience, was the consequence of the 5 Ws, the fact that there would be no school. Sure, people would be interested to know why there was no school on Thursday, but the story is No School.

What I like, in particular, about Made to Stick is that it is re-telling me several things I already knew, but had forgotten or had not assembled in the way Chip and Dan Heath had. The book is full of bits and pieces which cause me to say "of course, I knew that, so why wasn't I doing it?". It also combines a folksy style with a good level of academic research and reference.

Note, this version of the Nora Ephron's story was extracted from an interview with journalism website Poynter.org (no connection), the version in the book is similar, but I was not inclined it re-type it when I could re-source it.

Bad Boys Can be Over 90

BoingBoing has a wicked post and link to the Zimmers’ MySpace site. The Zimmers are a band of senior citizens, many of whom are over 90 years old. Their MySpace website includes a track of them recording the Who’s My Generation, along with pics from the session at Abbey Road.

As well as being good fun the site helps remind us that demographic profiling is increasingly useless, people differ in their tastes more than they differ in their demographics.

Formed in early 2007 the Zimmers believe they are the oldest gigging band in the world, with an average age of 78, the oldest being 100.

Think Before Your Post

There are a couple of interesting and salutary videos on YouTube which appear to be part of a campaign warning young people (or should that just be people) about the implications and dangers of posting information online.

They seem quite well thought through, but I am not sure they will dent the ‘immortal’ syndrome, where too many young people feel that they are immune from danger.

When technology goes wrong – in the bathroom

Although I am generally a fan of technology I have long suspected that the Japanese have been putting too much electronics into their toilets – I have a preference for toilets that do not have sound effects, heaters, and certainly not a user manual.

A story from the BBC today somewhat confirms that fear. The BBC report that Japanese toilet brand Toto is offering free repairs to 180,000 toilets after some of them caught fire! Unlike most products a product recall is not really suitable with something which is plumbed and cemented in.

Evidently there have been three cases of the electronic bidet accessory catching fire, fortunately nobody has been hurt by any of these fires.

Google Highlights Darfur Devastation

Reuters have a story about how Google and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online mapping project that will show evidence of atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Moe than 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur, although the Government keep denying that genocide is taking place. Google have uploaded high resolution satellite to Google Earth. These images allow people to see 1600 damaged or destroyed villages. In addition the remains of 100,000 homes, schools, mosques and other buildings, destroyed by the janjaweed militia are visible.

This initiative by Google is a strong reminder that all aspects of the globe of becoming local, increasingly there is no private, no dark corner, no out of site.

Apple Bottom of Greenpeace’s Eco League

An article in this week’s New Scientist drew my attention to the latest ranking of Eco-friendliness of mobile and PC manufacturers by Greanpeace. The top brand was Lenovo, a Chinese brand, followed by Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, and Dell. The worst brand (of the 14 ranked) was Apple, which was described as having low scores on almost all criteria and no progress.

This report was the third, following two in 2006. In all three reports Dell and Nokia were in the top 4. By contrast Apple was bottom in the last two leagues, and 4th from the bottom in the first list.

As a result of Apple’s low score and its users very high affection there are campaigns from people who love Apple who want it to turn green. One is based on download a green image onto your Mac and taking a picture of you hugging it. The pictures are then uploaded to flickr as part of campaign to get Apple to correct their ways. The campaign can be seen here.

This issue raises a number of branding issues and Web 2.0 issues. Apple is part great product, part pure emotion. As with spouses, some people will keep loving them when they turn out to be rotten, but plenty of others will, eventually move on.

Mobile Only Households

One of the best researched papers at the recent MRS Conference in Brighton was Bill Blyth’s ‘Mixed Mode: the only “fitness” regime’. One of the pieces of information which most caught my eye was the number of European countries which have already moved heavily towards households that do not have a landline per house, preferring to be mobile phone only households.

The top 10 in Bill’s list were:

Country	% of households mobile phone only
Lithuania	50%
Finland	47%
Latvia	39%
Portugal	38%
Slovakia	37%
Estonia	34%
Hungary	30%
Austria	29%
France	14%
UK	11%
USA	8%
Germany	8%

Table showing % of households with one or more mobile phones, but no fixed telephone line. Sources, Eurobarometer Dec 2005, US National Health Interview Survey 2005.

In addition to the top 10 countries I have added France, UK, USA and Germany from Bill’s figures to make the point that whilst these markets are often lead countries, they aren’t in this area.

One of the interesting conclusions that flows from these figures is that CATI is not a representative technique in large parts of Europe. At the moment most CATI projects deal very badly, if at all, with mobile phones. There is a growing trend to create mobile phone panels, but these will not replicate the claimed representivity of CATI projects.

I have long held the view that because of societal, legal, and technical changes most research will be conducted with panels and opt-in lists in the future, and these figures seem to support that view.

More signs of the decline of CATI

The April issue of MRS’s Research Magazine arrived through my letterbox today and on pages 4 and 5 were two more articles which augur the decline of CATI. The first was the news that GfK Custom is to close its last call centre in the US. This decision is the product of the shift towards outsourcing and offshoring call centres and of the modality shift to Internet based data collection. The article highlighted that other agencies such as TNS, Harris Interative, and Synovate have also been reducing their US-based call centre capacity.

The article also quoted the CASRO Trends Survey for 2006 which showed that telephone is still the largest primary medium, with 47%, ahead of Internet which is the primary data collection method for 39% of agencies. Jeff Sperring, head of operations at GfK Custom, said that the new strategy was “more fiscally sound”. “It transfers a large fixed cost to a variable cost,”.

The second article was on the news that the Australian telecoms regulator has set new, restrictive times of when researchers can call people, wrapping them in with tele-marketers. The new time slot will be 9:00am to 8:30pm on weekdays, between 9:00am and 5:00pm on Saturdays, and not at all on Sundays and public holidays – unless recipients have given prior permission. The weekday restrictions are in line with researchers’ own guidelines, but the loss of weekend slots will surely impact the representivity of surveys.

Most of the discussion of trends concentrates on the growth of online and the decline of other modalities, but I suspect the big change is away from sampling towards panels. We are already seeing a growth in mobile phone panels and I am sure that most CATI as well as most online research will be conducted via panels in the future.

Utah Bans Keyword Advertising

In a move reminiscent of King Canute trying to turn back the tide the US state of Utah has passed a law banning the sale of keywords by search engines. Slashdot has a post about the move and there is fuller article by Eric Goldman here.

Evidently Utah has a track record of passing legislation to try and constrain the workings of the Internet. Most of this legislation has either been struck down by the courts or simply failed to have any impact.

Utah, it appears, considers selling keywords to be an infringement of the rights of any company who owns the word being searched for, with legislators using terms such as ‘carjacked’ to describe the process. The main practical weakness of the legislation being that none of the search engines can reliably tell whether a user is from Utah – which would mean that if the Utah law were to be successful it would have to work extraterritorially.

Whilst it is almost amusing to see a state of a single country try to regulate the Internet, like watching an ant trying to demolish a building, it does remind us that, by and large, countries can’t regulate the Internet either – which raises the question about who will protect the weak and defenceless in the future? Very few people worry about ad words, but what about cyber bullying, child abuse, genocide denial, and fraud?

N.B. King Canute was a Viking who from 995 to 1035 and was King of England, Denmark, Norway, and parts of Sweden. When he tried to turn back the tide he was actually illustrating to his followers that his powers were limited, he knew they were limited, but his followers needed convincing.