MRA launches program to review online sample providers
The Marketing Research Association (MRA), Glastonbury, Conn., has created a research company review program to provide transparency in online research. The MRA Review Program is designed to vet and standardize online sample providers and to create a clear understanding of panel supplier practices as they relate to data quality.
The program consists of two elements, the first being a self review, where online sample providers can provide the information on their organization so buyers can better understand their capabilities. The second element is the internal review, where an independent professional researcher retained by MRA visits the company and verifies data provided. The review is intended to reveal the makeup of the company’s panels or river samples, among other qualities. Results of any company participating at either level are put on the MRA Web site. For more information visit www.mra-net.org.
New report measures impact of economy on consumers
The NPD Group, a Port Washington, N.Y., research company, has launched The Economy Tracker, a monthly report designed to provide insight into consumers’ perceptions of the U.S. economy, perceptions of their own economic situation and how they are responding to retail.
Specific measures available in the monthly report are focused on highlighting areas of opportunity for manufacturers and retailers, including the following: degree of confidence or concern; spending and shopping expectations overall and by category; key drivers of store and product selection; and changes in use of various payment methods. Categories covered in the report include consumer electronics, video games, music, movies, dining/eating out, apparel, footwear and others.
In addition to 12 monthly reports, a full report subscription includes quarterly summaries and a year-end analysis with a presentation designed to help identify the major economic trends and effects for the year. The tracker is based on online surveys completed by 1,000 nationally-representative respondents each month. For more information visit www.npd.com.
Online measurement tool goes PRO; smartphone users surveyed
TNS Compete, a Boston research company, has launched Compete PRO Enterprise, an online measurement service designed to serve as a hub for capturing and sharing online marketing insights across a large enterprise or agency. The tool is intended for larger brands and agencies and features unlimited site, search and referral analytics reports on-demand. Compete PRO is powered by the same data as Compete’s vertical intelligence solutions.
Compete PRO is also available on a more limited basis for individual small business owners, search and online marketers. For more information visit https://my.compete.com/enterprise.
Separately, TNS Compete has unveiled a new service, Smartphone Intelligence, designed to deliver behavioral and survey-based insights on iPhone and other smartphone users. It is intended to provide carriers, handset manufacturers and marketers with a complete picture of how to reach mobile consumers.
Smartphone Intelligence is designed to combine consumer insights (through surveys) with behavioral data (through online clickstream data) to reveal how smartphone owners are using their phones, the sites they visit on the Web and what they like and dislike about their phone and Internet experiences. Smartphone Intelligence subscribers will receive quarterly reports with data about smartphone use and behavior, as well as individual recommendations. For more information visit www.compete.com.
Portal service analyzes IT industry sentiments
Northern Light, a Cambridge, Mass., research company, has released MI Metrics, a service designed to provide an in-depth analysis of IT industry analysts’ observations, opinions and sentiments about the client company and targeted competitors and their products, strategies, performance and related industry issues. The information provided is distilled from market research reports, media articles and blog postings.
MI Metrics is a custom, analytic reporting service that provides a quantitative and qualitative overview of the total body of analyst coverage, including share of voice, net positives and negatives (to gauge analyst sentiment toward each company), and strategic business issues being discussed. In addition, Northern Light editors summarize analysts’ views on the covered companies.
MI Metrics is produced by Northern Light’s technology and its research staff using content and capa-bilities contained within SinglePoint, Northern Light’s research portal offering. MI Metrics also taps Northern Light Business News, a searchable set of content sources, including business news services, business publications, newswires and blogs.
Northern Light’s research indicates that approximately half of analyst mentions of companies occur in published analyst reports and the other half occur in news media.
MI Metrics reports are generated with the assistance of Northern Light’s MI Analyst, an automated meaning-extraction application designed for market intelligence, market research and product research.
Pricing is based on the number of companies and other variables included in the analysis, starting at $1,000 per month. For more information visit www.northernlight.com.
ComScore offers online ad measurement database
Reston, Va., research company comScore Inc. has made available its Brand Metrix norms database, a service designed to measure the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns in meeting branding objectives such as heightened brand awareness, improved attitudes toward the brand, increased purchase intent and incremental purchasing. The database is compiled from nearly 200 brand impact studies.
ComScore Brand Metrix relies on the comScore panel to parse differences in behavior and attitudes among consumers exposed to an online ad campaign compared to those who are not exposed. Designed to measure the true impact of online ad exposures, it is different in that it avoids the impact of cookie deletion, which can lead to an understatement of the actual view-through impact of online ads by a factor of 20 percent or more. For more information visit www.comscore.com.
Checkout launched to help test in-store strategies for new products
Ipsos MORI, a London division of Paris research company Ipsos, has launched Checkout as an addition to its suite of shopper research solutions. It is designed to increase the chances of success at launch by optimizing manufacturers’ in-store strategy in the competitive environment. Checkout can answer questions such as how the manufacturer’s new product will look and perform on the shelves against competitors, if the POS supports the launch by attracting consumers, creating interest and increasing motivation to buy; and how, if tested in a retail environment, manufacturers can keep it confidential from their competitors. For more information visit www.ipsos-mori.com.
Excel-based tool to track trends
WRC Research Systems Inc., Downers Grove, Ill., has released BrandTrend XL, an Excel-based tool designed to help researchers and marketers evaluate the impact of media and marketing on time-based data. It is designed to produce interactive trend charts which display the trend data along with media and marketing spending or events. Analytic screens are designed to allow for dynamic visualization as well as zoom or drill-down analysis of the data.
Product features include the ability to highlight data in Excel and trend it; the ability to handle date-tagged data that can be represented in Excel; questionnaire data from tracking studies; sales or volume data; share data; the ability to add in media and marketing data also from Excel sheets or files; a visualization screen; a zoom analysis screen with diagnostic charts and a written analysis; interactive trend charts; and more. For more information visit www.wrcresearch.com/brandtrend/brandtrendxl.htm.
TNS launches new digital ad effectiveness tools
New York research company TNS has introduced TNS Digital Suite, a generation of online advertising monitoring tools designed to combine cookie-tracking technology with TNS’s 6th Dimension Panel to enable analysis of online ad consumption. This panel-based methodology aims to allow advertisers to measure and understand the effectiveness of their online advertising with the same level of analysis as traditional advertising without interfering with the user experience.
Benefits of the TNS Digital Suite include no more pop-up surveys; control for cookie deletion; capturing ad exposure on multiple computers (home/work/school) for each panelist; ad effectiveness measures for the target audience, using the 6th Dimension panelists profiles (over 150 panelist characteristics); analysis through longer surveys (up to 30 minutes long against seven to eight minutes); surveys taken at the convenience of the panelists instead of the current proximate surveys which occur immediately after ad exposure; and analysis available based on frequency and time since last exposure. For more information visit www.tns-us.com.
Gongos goSHOP aims to predict retail success
Gongos Research, Auburn Hills, Mich., has released gongos goSHOP, an online research environment designed to simulate the retail environment; capture real-time data to track purchase behavior; predict in-market performance; serve as a virtual shopping platform to increase flexibility in the navigation of product options with multiple views and package details; allow for the randomization of products to reduce shelf-location bias; and result in a representative sample of consumers.
The goSHOP environment is intended to allow companies to analyze and manipulate data, evaluate heat maps and test take-rates against real-market performance. For more information visit www.gongos.com.
Briefly
Vision Critical Inc., a Vancouver, B.C., research company, has released its online research platform Sparq. The platform features access to tools for transforming text-based surveys into more visually-appealing experiences to improve long-term respondent engagement.
Sparq is designed to allow researchers to build visual questions quickly and independently with no incremental cost. It includes visual questions, community discussion analysis and enhanced respondent portals.
Sparq is also designed to unite one-off surveys, custom panels and private online communities. For more information visit www.visioncritical.com/sparq.
Eularis, a New York research company, has made available its report, Pre-Launch Planning: Priming Your Pharmaceutical Brand for Profit and Success, which examines the concept and components of effective pre-launch pharmaceutical planning. The report describes the phases of pre-launch planning and looks at organizational strategies, marketing tactics, regulatory considerations, pre-launch analytics techniques and case studies of success. For more information visit www.pharmaprelaunchroi.com/index.asp.
Dulles, Va., research company Vovici has released Vovici Feedback Intelligence, a solution for survey analytics designed to marry business intelligence with feedback data. The program is designed to allow business users to analyze, visualize and distribute feedback analyses without having to export feedback data into analytic tools or having to wait for custom reports to be written by scarce technical resources. For more information visit www.vovici.com.
San Mateo, Calif., research company Epocrates Inc. has expanded its market research panel to include physicians and pharmacists in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The expansion is designed to allow researchers working with Epocrates to meet their U.S. and European panel fulfillment needs simultaneously. For more information visit www.epocrates.com.
North Star Marketing, a Lancaster, Pa., public relations agency, has developed NowVue, a technology designed to give companies real-time analytics of how visitors are using their Web sites. NowVue is designed to provide a focus group-style platform to test new Web sites, site features, products and statistical data to support the findings. For more information visit www.northstar-m.com.
Waltham, Mass., research company Invoke Solutions has debuted Engage Analytics, an interactive, real-time, Web-based dashboard and data portal that is designed to house all of Invoke clients’ project and program data. Invoke plans to use Engage Analytics in all research endeavors going forward. For more information visit www.invoke.com.
JuxtConsult, a New Delhi, India, research company, has created an online panel of 115,000+ members designed to represent 86 percent of the total urban Indian population (currently 337 million people). In addition to collecting the geographic, demographic and psychographic details of its panelists, JuxtConsult is gathering information on housing, family composition, shopping, vehicle ownership, mobile ownership, health, traditional media usage and brand preferences. JuxtConsult has adopted a Web site called getcounted.net to build its online panel. For more information visit www.juxtconsult.com.
San Francisco research company Peanut Labs has made its sampling service Sample3.0 available to clients wanting U.K.-based survey participants. Sample3.0 is designed to give marketers a profiled and targeted sample of social network users through its integration with 81 networking sites. Users of these sites are encouraged to take part in surveys and must complete a profile questionnaire. Peanut Labs uses this information to match surveys to potential respondents, who then receive invitations through their social network. For more information visit www.peanutlabs.com.
Redlands, Calif., geographic mapping software company ESRI’s ArcGIS software has been supported by Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008. The SQL Server 2008 integration is designed to provide users with tools to consume, use and extend location-based analysis for computing and Web collaboration. For more information visit www.esri.com/sqlserver2008.
B2B International, a Manchester, U.K., research company, has launched INSTEP (Independent Student Experience Program), a tool designed to enable schools and educational establishments in the U.K. to conduct market research as a way to understand the needs of their students. INSTEP has been designed to complement the National Student Survey, an initiative funded by the U.K. government and run by Ipsos MORI, and to measure actual levels of satisfaction and pinpoint areas likely to impact student satisfaction. For more information visit www.b2binternational.com.