Todd Hollander Market Research

As many as 15 percent of U.S. adults used only a cell phone last year, up from 10 percent in 2006. That estimate from the Yankee Group, a technology research and consulting company based in Boston, puts the number of American adults without a landline telephone in the home at a whopping 33 million.

The company projects that the number of landline phones will decrease from 93.8 million in 2006 to 78.8 million in 2011. During this same period, they expect the number of cell phones to increase from 188.7 million to 214.5 million.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that cell-phone plans with free nights and weekends, free mobile-to-mobile calling, and free calls to other customers of the same provider have made it easy for many cell-phone customers to give up the landline. Additionally, new plans announced by Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile could entice even more people to drop their home phones by offering unlimited mobile calling plans for a flat rate of $99.99 a month.

The implications for the market research industry are substantial.

• Because landline phones in homes are no longer ubiquitous, random digit dialing is less and less reliable for obtaining representative samples.
• It is increasingly difficult to reach young, single people with traditional telephone research.
• Moving forward, more and more surveys will be completed via cell-phones — not by voice but by integrated web browsers or SMS technology.

The bottom line: Landline telephone surveys are no longer the “gold standard” of the market research industry.

When planning a quantitative market research study, one of the first decisions that must be made is which method of data collection to use: online, telephone, in-person, postal mail, email, or other. Until the mid 1990’s, telephone interviewing was the norm for market researchers. Today, online surveys have become the preferred method for most research projects.

Using the Internet as a medium for data collection began around 1995. In its infancy, online surveying was considered inferior to offline methods such as telephone interviewing because of concerns about:

• Representativeness. Only a portion of the population had access to the internet.
• Reaching the respondent . There were no directories or complete lists of Internet users from which samples could be drawn.
• Unsupervised respondents. There was no way to verify who was really at the other end of the connection or how seriously the respondent took the survey.
• Technical limitations of the medium. Slow connections, conflicting security settings, lack of plug-ins for advanced features, differing hardware and software configurations, and bottlenecks caused by too many people trying to access a survey at the same time.
• Loss of direct contact. Interviewers could no longer use and benefit from direct verbal communication with the respondent.
• Privacy concerns. Some respondents were skeptical about the confidentiality of their responses or how the information would be used.
• “Professional” respondents. The integrity of the results could be compromised by respondents who were motivated primarily by incentives.

In the last decade, online research has evolved and expanded to solve each of these problems. As a result, online surveys have replaced telephone interviewing as the “gold standard” of market research because they offer:

• Lower cost
• Faster turnaround
• More convenience and less intrusion for respondents
• Ability to gain insight from hard-to-reach people and geographically dispersed populations
• A more flexible medium, including the increasingly wide range of stimuli that can be used
• More thorough responses
• More truthful/revealing responses

The bottom line: Online surveys offer a number of advantages over telephone interviews and other offline methods. Although no single data collection method is best for all situations, online surveys have become the “gold standard” of marketing research.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, 12.8 percent of U.S. households cannot be reached by a telephone survey because they have only a cell phone and no landline telephone. If these people were just like those with landlines, this would not create a problem for researchers. But cell phone-only adults are very different.

Cell Phone Only

A growing number of Americans rely solely on a cell phone for their telephone service, and many more are considering giving up their landline phones. This trend presents a challenge to market research and public opinion polling conducted by telephone, which typically relies on a sample of the population of landline subscribers.

The National Health Interview Survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center in conjunction with the Associated Press and AOL, found cell phone-only adults to be younger, more heavily African-American or Hispanic, less likely to be married, and less likely to own a home than adults with landline telephones. These demographic characteristics were correlated with a wide range of social and political behaviors.

In early 2003, just 3.2 percent of households were cell phone-only. In the fall of 2004, the National Election Pool’s exit poll found that 7.1 percent of those who voted on Election Day had only a cell phone. At the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, a government researcher predicted that the size of the cell phone-only group could approach 25 percent by the end of 2008 if the current rate of increase is sustained.

Landline Only

According to data from the National Center for Heath Statistics, 37% of Americans have only a landline. Like the cell phone-only population, Americans who use only a landline only are demographically distinctive. A much higher percentage (41%) are ages 65 and older, compared with the general public (16%). The landline-only group also includes a greater proportion of whites (82%) than the general public (73%).

About a quarter of landline users (23%) say they are very (8%) or somewhat likely (15%) to stop using their landline and switch to using only a cell phone. A much higher percentage of young people (40% of those under age 30 vs. 19% of those 30 and older) say they are likely to abandon their landlines.

The Bottom Line

Political polls can be weighted to offset the effect of the cell phone-only population. However, because of the rising number of Americans who no longer use landline phones, there is growing concern about how long the landline telephone survey will remain a viable data collection tool for traditional market research.