Is the Internet a boon or a bane for the marketing research industry? Depends on your point of view. Some see it as the long-sought way to conduct research better, faster, and cheaper. And they feel the Web will save the industry from declining cooperation rates by making research fun and interesting for respondents.

The anti-Intemet camp holds that on-line research is fraught with biases. In addition, others fret that it’s a haven for snake oil salesmen dressing up crude data gathering capabilities in glittering high-tech finery.

As with any wildly debated topic, the truth is probably somewhere in between.

No matter how you feel, it’s clear that Internet research is here to stay. But what will its long-term impact be? How can we take advantage of its enormous potential? And what are the issues affecting its viability? For answers to these and other questions, I chatted with five research service providers:

  • Steve Cook, senior vice president, client development, Greenfield Online, a Wilton, Conn., on-line research firm.
  • Nigel Hopkins, vice president, advanced products group, MarketTools, a Sausalito, Calif., on-line research firm.
  • John Houlahan, chairman and CEO of FocusVision Worldwide, a Stamford, Conn., provider of services for broadcasting and viewing focus groups via the Internet and videotransmission.
  • Bill MacElroy, president, Modalis Research Technologies Inc. (formerly Socratic Technologies), a San Francisco research firm.
  • Amy Yoffie, vice president and general manager of Research Connections (a division of Talk City Inc.), a Westfield, N.J., on-line research firm.

Met with skepticism

The Internet may be unprecedented in its impact on the industry, but Cook points out that new methodologies - many technology-driven - have always been met with skepticism. "In the ’60s telephone interviewing came on the scene and all the academics and the purists in the industry said that it wasn’t as representative as door-to-door probability sampiing. It took some time to convince people that it was an acceptable method. In the ’70s came mall panel research and the same hue and cry arose. As with other techniques, there were applications it was appropriate for and some it wasn’t. In the’ 80s we had similar issues with mall research: How representative could four mails be of the total population? The reality was, for certain kinds of studies, there was no other way to get that kind of information," Cook says.

For many people, change is not always welcome, and researchers are no exception, as Yoffie found when she began doing on-line research in 1994. "I saw a lot of parailels to when I started selling CATI software in 1986: the skepticism, the deniai, the belief that it was a passing phase. I think there are plenty of people who keep hoping that this is going to go away."

But far from going away, on-line research has grown exponentiaily. "[The research industry has] moved from doing a few tenths of a percent of research on-line to about 2 percent last year and to 10 percent this year," Cook says. "And depending upon whose estimate is right, the thought is that on-line will account for between 25-50 percent of ail research conducted in the next three years. That is nothing short of astounding."

Fueling that growth is the late arrivai to on-line research of industries that have historicaily been big research users, Cook says. "The earliest adopters of on-line research were very naturaily the tech industry, followed by the service industry, particularly telecommunications. The last to adopt were the consumer packaged goods companies, and this is the complete reverse of the spending levels on traditionai research. So the potentiai is huge, because the CPG companies are adopting it now."

Respondents’ rights

Protecting the on-line respondent may be the most important task facing both the users and providers of Internet research services. Industry organizations have been diligently crafting a bill of fights for respondents and setting forth guidelines for conducting research on-line to do just that. It won’t be easy. Researchers see in on-line respondents the very qualities that are in short supply in telephone interviewees: they’re relatively cooperative and easy to reach. So there is a huge temptation to uuleash a torrent of surveys on these now-wilfing audiences and end up possibly surveying them to death.

In addition, through spam and other e-annoyances, the same poisons that have seeped into the telephone research pool - unrelenting (though legitimate) direct marketing and its evil twins, sugging (selling under the guise of research) and frugging (fund-raising under the guise of research) -- threaten to contaminate the on-line reservoir.

Researchers can’t control the spammers but they can make sure that they don’t add unsolicited recruiting letters to already-stuffed e-mailboxes. MacElroy talks about receiving an e-mail from a smail city in Florida asking him to take a survey on the town’s public transit system. The only problem is, he’s in the San Francisco area. "These are examples of people who have access to the Intemet and who do not know the rules of engagement. In many cases these are innocent mistakes but they are burning through what you might call the ’free range respondents.’ If this kind of thing keeps up, pretty soon it will be difficult to get anybody to do anything on
the Web."

"Privacy issues are aiways important in any form of legitimate marketing research," John Houlahan says. "If I am going to participate in your survey I don’t want to end up on a mailing fist. The industry must address the issue of privacy and confidentiality and give respondents the feeling that they can respond in a candid manner and their information will be treated with respect."

"Our firm doesn’t provide information to any third party other than in the aggregate," Cook says. "We are very stringent about using third-party fists. Clients will often come to us and say, ’I have a list of x-thousand e mail addresses from my customers. Just e-mail them and ask them to participate.’ But that would be spamming. If the e-mail list was captured by the client in cookie-ing visitors to their site, they have not opted in, they have not given their permission to be contacted."

Privacy concerns extend to client information as well. For example, what’s to prevent a respondent from downloading a page with a new product concept on it and e-mailing it to a friend, who just happens to work for a competing firm? But technology such as Alchemedia’s CleverContent can protect images on Web sites from being copied or downloaded, so companies may not need to fear that the packaging mock-up they are testing on-fine will be copied and e-mailed to a competitor.

No panacea

With all the hype and interest surrounding on-line research, it’s easy to get the impression that it’s the only way to do research. While it is great for some kinds of research and for reaching certain Net-savvy audiences, it isn’t the only game in town. Nor will it produce miracles of time and cost savings. "We as on-line research providers need to set client expectations properly," Cook says. "We should not oversell it, we should not attempt to make on-fine research a panacea for everything. When appropriate we should say that this is not the proper technique and warn clients why it is different and how it is different and address the issues of security, and the representativity."

"I never tell the client Ion-line research] is representative of the U.S. population, but it may be of the population they want to talk to," Yoffie adds. "As long as you know what you’re going for and those people are represented on the Web, I don’t see a problem."

"Respondents are often more willing to participate in online research but people on the Internet are conditioned to have things happen quickly," Cook says. "So just because on-line research is less expensive, you can’t take a 45-minute interview and administer it on-line. You can’t take a CATI interview and put it on the Web. You need to engage the respondents. The research should be fun, fast, and you need to respect their integrity and intelligence."

Crystal ball

My de-facto panel of experts expressed a lot of enthusiasm about on-line research, especially when the taik turned to its future.

Yoffle foresees the Web delivering greater data analysis capabilities and flexibilities. "We’re doing ail this work on-line but we’re still delivering our tables on paper. There are companies that allow you do view your crosstabs on-line but what is coming down the road is the ability to do crosstabs on-line."

To MacElroy, the future will find companies developing survey approaches that take advantage of the Web’s strengths, such as its ability to handle multimedia. "Most of the research has been taking standard telephone surveys and putting them on the Web, which has been under-utilizing the power of the Web. Now we are beginning to see people experiment with new techniques and technologies."

MacElroy doesn’t see Web research using virtual environments, as they would be too bandwidth-heavy. Rather, animation and other tools will help researchers develop new product concepts in real time. "You are going to be able to build ideal products on-line and see them as you do it, so you’ll be building virtual products, concepts - almost creating a new way of visualizing data."

Hopkins feels the Internet will make continuous studies more commonplace. "With studies administered by phone or mail, there’s a distinct economic reason to complete fielding within a discrete time-period: management overhead. The Web levels this economic barrier. It will make it possible to keep the study out there running, providing timely results available on-demand from a rolling set of data. When you consider the time-compression occurring in decision-making cycles this will be an especiaily important development.

"I also see syndicated studies getting new life, with researchers and decision-makers being able to easily and massively customize the information delivered to them from one shared data collection exercise. While the economies derived through the historical business model will remain, the value of syndicated studies will be enhanced incredibly by Internet technology."

A little homework

How best to take advantage of all the Internet has to offer? Do a little homework before conducting your own on-line research or choosing a provider, to find out what is considered proper "netiquette," what are good recruitment techniques, etc. "It’s the responsibility of the company doing the hiring to do the background checks and it is the responsibility of the company doing the research to be above reproach," Yoffie says.

(Several research industry association Web sites [www.cmor.org, www.mra-net.org, www.casro.org, www.imro.org, www.esomar.nl] have information on online research guidelines.)

Many firms offer on-line research services, but not all of them know what they’re doing. "The cost of entry into the research business is minimai," Cook says. "Anyone can hang up a shingle. In the on-line environment, the cost is even lower. There are several very good research tools available for the Internet that can be purchased inexpensively. However, good tools in the hands of the uneducated can lead us down the wrong path, as the industry has found in the off-line world, where data projecting incorrect results leads marketers to make wrong decisions. As a result, marketing research gets a black eye," Cook says.

"You don’t want the anaiysis, the thoughtful interpretation, to become an amateur sport," Houlahan says. "Trained researchers need to have the final say on the vaiidity and the meaning of the data and the challenge there is for the marketing researchers to be more proactive and get the information in the right form to the right people, and thereby earn a seat or maintain a seat at the table when marketing, financial, and strategic decisions are made."

"The biggest thing that we can do is try and educate people who want to do this. We have a responsibility to share what we know works and what doesn’t work and keep the industry alive," MacElroy says.

In the end, you get what you pay for, Yoffie says. "I think that there are aiways going to be people who will see the Web as a way to do easy and cheap research. But I think responsible researchers are just as responsible on-line as they are offline. People who are going to hire firms to do this for them need to make sure that they are really a market research firm, not just some Internet firm that knows how to put up a survey, and that the company provides the same rigorous standards on-line as off-line.

"The good news is, I think the purchasers are becoming more sophisticated. Before, they were reaily feeling around in the dark, looking for companies that knew how to do this black magic called Internet research. But now they are becoming more sophisticated and demanding so that they can make informed decisions, and I absolutely welcome that."