The Gillette Co.'s personal care division, which generates more than 50 market surveys each year, has become more efficient as a result of using a new software program to analyze survey research data, says Irwin Blau, division research manager at Gillette.

The product, A-CROSS, is a PC cross-tabulation program published by Strawberry Software, Inc., Watertown, Mass. The program prepares cross-tabulated material in spreadsheet form and brings multi-tasking functionality to application software for the first time.

"Our surveys elicit consumer reactions to new, existing and competitive products and advertising," says Blau. "The software program gives us the ability to access the data ourselves and to create whatever tables we want created."

According to Blau, prior to using A-CROSS, Gillette's personal care division relied exclusively on outside research services for its cross-tabulation.

"We wrote the surveys and the outside market research firms collected and cross-tabulated all the data," says Blau. "Then we wrote our reports.

"But no matter how we tried to 'spec' out a job beforehand, we could never anticipate every conceivable table we would need and ordering new ones would take several days and was very costly," says Blau.

Ordinarily, this scenario posed few problems, says Blau. But on those occasions when additional tables were needed quickly, Blau was forced to delay his final reports.

Creating tables

"We used to go back to the research firm for 10 or 15 more tables and then wait a week," he recalls. "Our only other choice was to have employees pull data manually and that was a process fraught with error. We knew that if we could find a way to cross-tab ourselves, we'd be able to create our own tables in less time and at a lower cost. The major obstacle was in finding a program that was both powerful and easy to use."

In 1985, Blau tested two PC software programs that claimed cross-tabulation features. The first, he reports, was functional but very confusing to use. "It wasn't menu-driven," says Blau. "You had to know a certain language to use it and if you didn't know this, you really couldn't go very far."

The second program tested, says Blau, was not a "full blown" crosstabulation package. "It ran marginal tabulations with coded counts, rather than complete cross-tab explanations. It also was command-driven and the burden of using it far outweighed the benefits."

Blau learned of A-CROSS in mid1986 through a market research consultant. At the time, A-CROSS was under development and Gillette was about to launch its annual National Consumer Survey, a broad-based study examining consumer buying trends in several market areas.

A short time later, Blau and six other Gillette personal care division research professionals began using the software program to perform crosstabulations. They experienced none of the difficulty witnessed with the two packages tested previously.

Fast learning

"A-CROSS took about an hour for us to learn and was very fast," Blau recalls. "You can produce finished tables without having to worry about checking numbers or type. You can use the finished tables directly in reports."

Blau's department still uses outside research services to amass research data and perform fundamental crosstabulations. Typically, his staff will use A-CROSS to create tables not addressed in market research studies conducted through market research firms.

Efficient use

In one recent four-city study, Blau was able to use the software program to respond to a Gillette request for immediate preliminary results. "I put my finished data tables into Lotus and ran graphs on them without ever pulling a number out of a book," says Blau. "The whole operation took only a few hours, as compared to the week it would have taken if I had asked a market research firm to do the work.

"A-CROSS has made us much more efficient," concludes Blau. "The program's ability to give us access to data and generate our own tables could potentially justify the cost in one run. Plus, it's a lot faster and easier to use than the programs we had tested previously."