The Homa Files

Excerpt from Ad Age “The End of Consumer Surveys?” September 15, 2008

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After issuing dire warnings about the future of consumer surveys, the two biggest advertisers and buyers of market research in the world — Procter & Gamble and Unilever — are linking with the Advertising Research Foundation for an industry effort to embrace online chatter and other naturally occurring feedback like never before…

“I don’t know if we are going to have a choice but to move away from survey research,” said Donna Goldfarb, VP-consumer and market insights for Unilever Americas… “We continue to torture consumers with boring and antiquated search methods,” she said. “What’s holding us back is history and norms…”

To be sure, both companies continue to do plenty of surveys tracking brand-equity metrics for hundreds of brands daily. Ms. Dedeker noted in 2006 her company alone spent $200 million on 600 research vendors…

Yet statements signal a shift in paradigms, and most likely budgets, away from surveys and toward mining insights from blogs, social networks, consumer comments to websites and more, said Joel Rubinson, chief research officer of the ARF…

Though many…have expressed doubts in the past about how well bloggers or participants in social networks represent the broader population, Mr. Rubinson said it’s clear that digital chatter can have useful statistical properties…Clearly, however, traditional survey researchers won’t go away quickly or without a fight…

Campbell, CEO of Millward Brown…noted that “…it’s highly unlikely you’re going to be able to quantify who’s seeing your advertising in any meaningful way by simply listening in on the web.” Big issues that interest almost everyone — such as presidential elections — generate statistically useful web chatter, she said, but household-product brands usually don’t“…

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While collecting blogger information is undoubtedly useful for marketers and advertisers, blog comments are likely to be skewed to extremes of opinions.  Either a consumer is posting because of his overwhelming excitement about a product or issue, or equally and possibly more likely because of his extreme distaste for a product or issue.

A recent Pew Internet research study also reveals that only 42% of internet users have read a blog or online journal and only 12% of respondents write their own. While these numbers will likely grow the sample remains too small at this point to have hopes of replacing consumer surveys. 

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Full article:
http://adage.com/article?article_id=130964

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