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Market researchers may migrate to Net
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, Market researchers are spending a lot less time accosting shoppers at the mall for reactions to new products. Two of the nation's biggest packaged goods companies are moving more of their market research effort to the Internet. Food and household goods companies spend about $5-billion a year on syndicated and custom market research, testing product ideas, measuring the strength of brands, plumbing the effectiveness of ad campaigns and assessing consumer attitudes. But Procter & Gamble and General Mills have made small investments in MarketTools, which makes software designed to replace traditional telephone surveys and mall focus groups with Web-based tools. In the new world of market research, instead of a conversation with a researcher brandishing a clipboard, consumers log onto a Web site and give their assessments of different products. MarketTools software compiles and tabulates consumer reactions automatically and converts the data to a form that can be compared with earlier surveys. Does the new research technique reach the same swath of America? General Mills tested the breadth of Internet research against surveys done with older approaches about a year ago and found they were indeed reaching the same demographic groups. Since then, the company has used the Internet to test consumer reaction to new products, such as its Milk 'n' Cereal bars. It now conducts about 60 percent of its research over the Internet, which has accelerated the pace, said Gayle Fuguitt, General Mills' vice president of consumer insights and a MarketTools board member. "We get people telling us, 'I really enjoyed the survey,' " Fuguitt said. "You can imagine that is not the response you get when you call someone at home or stop them at the mall." Although General Mills will not say how much it spends on market research each year, Procter & Gamble spends about $140-million annually on research, said Barbara Lindsey, a director in Procter's consumer and market knowledge department. About $70-million of that money is on research in the United States, and Lindsey said the company could eventually cut that figure in half by conducting more work on the Internet. Still, some market research will always be done the low-technology way, Fuguitt said. "There is no substitute for meeting people in their kitchen and finding out how they prepare food," she said.
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From the Times Business report
From the AP
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