Todd Hollander Market Research

My brother is a very smart guy. His company Group 80/20 works with marketing teams who are brilliant at messaging but obstructed by technology. One of the solutions he recommends to his clients is to use RSS feeds to manage the information overload experienced by most executives today. According to Mark,

“The purpose of using RSS feeds is to “put you in charge of the news you read and track. Why not just create your own personal newspaper with only the items you care about? The companies you have to track… The sports teams you follow… The keywords you care about.”

This is good advice. I have used it with very positive results and, thanks to Mark, you can too. Just follow his easy step-by-step guide to setting up your own RSS feeds. You’ll be glad you did!

Customer satisfaction with businesses in the retail and financial services sectors increased in the fourth quarter of 2006, according to a report by the University of Michigan�s American Customer Satisfaction Index. On a 100-point scale, the index rose nearly 2 percent to 74.9, its highest mark since its first measure in 1994.

The index is viewed as a consumer spending indicator.

�I think consumer spending will remain strong as long as foreign investors will finance it. I�m talking particularly about China,� said professor Claes Fornell, director of the U-M�s National Quality Research Center, which compiles and analyzes the ACSI data. �And as long as there are no major shocks to the system.�

When I first started in the marketing research business 20-something years ago, telephone research was the �gold standard� of data collection. In those days, the telephone was the great equalizer. Everyone had one, and nearly everyone answered when it rang. Today, it is much more difficult to complete interviews by telephone. One reason is that a large percentage of people use Caller I.D. devices and answering machines to screen calls. Additionally, a smaller but significant percentage of people have gotten rid of the landlines in their homes and use only cell phones.

As a result, online surveys have supplanted telephone surveys as the method of choice. There are a number of advantages of web-based surveys over telephone surveys, not only for marketing researchers but also for respondents. Here are a few:

Advantages for Respondents

• Respondents consider web-based surveys far less intrusive than telephone surveys
• Because they can complete them whenever it is convenient, respondents find web-based surveys far more convenient than telephone surveys
• There is a significantly higher sense of anonymity and confidentiality of responses

Advantages for Marketers and Marketing Researchers

• Considerably lower cost
• Significantly faster data collection
• Seamless skipping, branching, and piping of questions
• No interviewer bias
• No interviewer error
• More thorough responses
• More frank/honest responses

The bottom line: Compared to telephone surveys, web-based surveys offer a number of advantages for both researchers and respondents. Because of these advantages, the internet has replaced the telephone as the interviewing method of choice.