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.

Results of a recent poll from Harris Interactive show that 178 million U.S. adults are using the Internet. That is a whopping 79 percent.

This is a dramatic increase from the 9% of U.S. adults who reported they went online when Harris first started tracking Internet use in 1995.

The number of adults accessing the internet from home has risen to 72%, up from 70% in 2006 and 66% in 2005.

The amount of time spent online has also continued to increase. Adult Americans are now spending an average of 11 hours per week online, up from 9 hours per week in 2006 and 8 hours in 2005.

With eight out of ten adults now online, and an ever increasing number of people discontinuing their use of landline telephones, web surveys have replaced telephone surveys as the market research industry’s method of choice.