Stiff upper lip, clean underarms
Only a quarter of British claim to "have a problem with underarm odor," according to a survey published by Taylor Nelson Sofres’ European Toiletries and Cosmetics Database (ETCD). This compares to well over half of people in France (57 percent) and Spain (54 percent) who admitted to having a problem with underarm odor.
The findings also reveal that more British use deodorants than their European counterparts. Almost nine out of 10 (87 percent) British use some form of deodorant, compared with only eight out of 10 (80 percent) Germans and around three quarters of people in France, Italy, and Spain. In terms of format, sprays are still the favored deodorant product delivery type across all countries surveyed, except in Spain, where contact format (roll-ons, sticks and creams) have traditionally been more popular.
In the U.K., more than nine out of 10 (95 percent) women use deodorant, compared to just eight out of 10 men. Across all countries surveyed, more than half (51 percent) of the female population use a roll-on/stick/cream deodorant, compared to just a third (33 percent) of men.
"Higher deodorant usage in Britain can, in part, be explained by a geater concern about underarm body odor and perspiration than in other European countries," says Alex Seron, account manager, TNS Consumer Usage Panels division. "Certainly, the media images of a sweat-drenched Tony Blair in a blue shirt at last year’s Labour Party Conference helped to reinforce this concern. On the other hand, perspiration may be considered more ’natural’ and, therefore, more acceptable, in countries such as Italy and France, where it is often more closely associated with traditional images of masculinity.
"At the same time, while sprays are still the favored deodorant type in most countries surveyed, it appears that contact deodorants - such as roll-ons and sticks - are increasing their market share, especially with the launch of new brands in this market sector. The trend is predominantly driven by women, who are increasingly looking for new and more effective ways of controlling perspiration, particularly in the workplace."
The findings are based on Taylor Nelson Sofres’ European Toiletries and Cosmetics Database (ETCD). Research has been undertaken since January 1995 amongst a representative sample each year of 14,000 people (aged 11-74 years old). The five countries covered by this survey are Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
How do you spend your free time?
According to The Harris Poll, reading (28 percent), TV watching (20 percent), spending time with family and kids (12 percent), fishing (12 percent), and gardening (10 percent) are the nation’s favorite ways of using their leisure time, all relatively unchanged from the results over the last few years.
The time that people claim to spend on their work, including paid work, keeping house and school, remains unchanged at 50 hours per week. This has not changed significantly since 1989. In 1987 people reported working only 47 hours a week.
The amount of time available to people to relax, watch TV, take part in sports or hobbies, go swimming, go to the movies, theater, concerts or other forms of entertainment, or to get together with friends, also remains unchanged at 20 hours per week. This has not changed substantially since the early and mid-1970s, when people reported having 26 hours (in 1973) and 24 hours (in 1975) available for leisure-time activities.
After the most popular leisure-time activities mentioned above, other relatively popular pastimes are swimming (8 percent), computer activities (7 percent), going to the movies (7 percent), walking (6 percent), golf (6 percent), exercise and playing team sports (each at 5 percent).
Compared to a few years ago, the biggest increase is in the popularity of computer activities (presumably in many cases the Internet), up from 2 percent in 1995, and 3 percent in 1997 and 1998, to 7 percent now.
Other activities mentioned by 1 percent include motorcycling, theater, tennis, horseback riding, dancing, skiing, writing, driving, racing cars. These results are from The Harris Poll, a nationwide survey of 1,011 adults surveyed by telephone between June 13-18.
Testing with virtual prototypes shows potential
One of the toughest Challenges faced by a product design team is concept selection comparing any number of potential product ideas in order to choose a winner. Traditionally, companies have relied on physical prototypes or statistical analysis to test the whims of consumers. Now the Internet introduces a tantalizing option virtual prototypes. "It’s a market research tool that has a promising future," says Stanford Business School marketing professor V. "Seenu" Srinivasan.
In a research study, Srinlvasan tested the ability of Internet-based virtual prototypes to accurately predict consumer choice. He concluded that virtual prototypes provide nearly the same results as physical prototypes. Furthermore, virtual prototypes cost considerably less to build and test than their physical counterparts, so design teams using Internet-based product research could potentially afford to explore a much larger number of concepts. "In short, the Web can help to reduce the uncertainty in a new product introduction by allowing more ideas to be concept tested in parallel," says Srinivasan, who is the Ernest C. Arbuckle professor of marketing and management science at the Business School.
Working with research coauthor Ely Dahan, an assistant professor of management science at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Srinivasan pitted the virtual prototype against conventional market research methods including both physical prototypes and non-visual, attribute-only conjoint analysis. Nine concepts for a new portable bicycle pump competed against two existing bike pumps in the tests, which surveyed respondents who were university studentsscreened for bicycle use. Characteristics such as price, time for inflation, size, ease of inflation, and durability were included as product attributes. Both still-picture and animated virtual prototype tests produced market shares that closely mirrored those obtained with the physical products. And, the visual prototypes outperformed the set of predictions produced in the attribute-only conjoint analysis, which failed to capture the aesthetic and usability aspects of the product.
The attribute-only conjoint analysis identified the top three products in correct order. However, it predicted market shares for the top three products to be well below those achieved using physical prototypes. This sort of forecasting gap may be ffiled at least in part by the realistic animations of virtual prototyping. Indeed, a breakthrough in virtual prototyping that allowed the researchers to conduct their study has been the development of virtual reality markup language (VRML), which produces high-quality color animation within very compact data files that can be easily downloaded by consumer research participants.
Yet virtual prototypes are not perfect. Sometimes there is a disconnect between the results of a physical prototype and a virtual one. In the Dahan-Srinivasan study, the Web-based survey predicted that a bike pump nicknamed Gecko could compete against the two commercially available products and ranked fourth in the market. But when customers handled the real thing, Gecko couldn’t score. It ranked last. One reason may be that the computer renderings of Gecko made it look and feel better in virtual reality. The fit and finish of the rubber material that gave Gecko its green, lizard-like texture and appearance was not of high quality, but that only became obvious when consumers actually touched the prototype.
The crucial question is which product characteristics are most accurately communicated only through a physical prototype? Sensory experiences such as smell, touch and taste have yet to be mastered in a virtual environment. "It remains to be seen which goods are best suited to virtual, visual testing, but we expect that many durable goods categories can be represented accurately using animation and compared using the simulated shopping experience," says Srinivasan. For unfamiliar products, an educational step could precede the concept tests, say the coauthors.
Not so world-wide after all
In the developed world, the Internet is literally in your face. Opportunities to go online are everywhere, and an estimated 400 million people use the World Wide Web daily.
Yet according to Minneapolis research firm Ipsos-Reid, billions of people have neither heard of the Internet nor have any intention of going online anytime soon. Even in countries such as the United States, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands, about one-third of people who could use the Internet choose not to. In fact, of the world’s 6 billion citizens, only about 6 percent are online. Why?
"The answer is twofold," says Brian Cruikshank, a senior vice president with Ipsos-Reid and leader of the company’s global technology practice. "In the developed world, a substantial number of people Who could very easily go online have decided not to. They see no compelling reason to be on the Web. The hype and the promise of the Internet clearly hasn’t impressed them not yet, at least. For others in nascent, less developed markets, the cost of accessing the Internet competes with the cost for basic necessities and access availability is very limited outside of urban areas."
Ipsos-Reid talked to people in 30 countries who aren’t on the Internet and who say they have no plans to be. The most frequently mentioned reasons for staying offline are "have no need for the Internet" (40 percent), "no computer" (33 percent), "no interest" (25 percent), "don’t know how to use it" (16 percent), "cost" (12 percent), or "no time" (10 percent).
In lesser-developed countries, where access to the Internet is a significant problem because of poverty and lack of a modern communications infrastructure, cost and access are cited as barriers more often than they are in major industrialized countries.
In urban India and urban South Africa, only one-quarter of the population has access to the Internet, and fewer than 10 percent of people report being recent users, the company found. In urban Russia, 83 percent of respondents reported having no Internet access at all.
"Those growing up on the Internet will one day make up the bulk of the population and there)viii be very few non-users dowia the road," Cruikshank says. "But that’s maybe an entire generation away in many developing markets. In the meantime, you still have a massive group - that is not going to disappear overnight - of potential users who have the means yet are still not convinced of the Web’s merits.
"The next crest of the Internet wave will come from markets that are already well along the way - particularly in Western Europe - with the most capacity for upside surprises, since their social structures and communications infrastructures offer few barriers," Cruikshank says. "in these countries, it’s simply a matter of time before more people go online. We have already started to see Europeans representing a larger proportion of the global Internet population."
The study offers the caveat that in other parts of the world, there are simply not enough access opportunities to go around. In other words, there are more adults with intentions of going online than there are adults with Internet access. These countries include South Korea and urban markets in Malaysia, India, Mexico, and South Africa.
"Far from being dead, the Internet has a large growth potential everywhere, but progress is destined to be slower than its most enthusiastic advocates might have envisioned a few years ago," says Cruikshank. To expand the reach of the Web in developing countries public venues such as libraries, schools, offices and Internet cafes will have to play a more crucial role.
Still, widespread availability is a long way off in the most populated areas of the world. Overall, Ipsos-Reid found that 98 percent of respondents own a television, 51 percent own a cell phone, 48 percent own a home computer but only 36 percent have home Internet access.
Survey measures levels of trust in various industries
A recent survey, The M Booth/Harris Trust Monitor, reports huge differences in the levels of public trust in different industries. When asked the question "How much would you trust the following industries to do the right thing if faced with a serious problem with one of their products?" the percentages of those who say they would trust them (including those who would trust them "somewhat") varies from 60 percent for food companies and 59 percent for both banks and retailers, to 12 percent for tobacco companies, 18 percent for entertainment companies and 19 percent for oil companies.
The list included three industries in health care:
- Pharmaceutical and drug companies ranked number five in the list of 16 industries, with 48 percent of the public saying they would trust them (at least somewhat) and 36 percent saying they would distrust them (at least somewhat).
- Biotech companies were much less well known; fully 43 percent said they would neither trust nor distrust them. Of the remainder, more said they would distrust (33 percent) than trust them (24 percent).
- Health insurance and managed care companies had among the highest level of distrust (58 percent), with only 26 percent saying they would trust them; so thg ratio of distrust to trust is worse than two-to-one. Only the tobacco industry (73 percent) and the oil industry (60 percent) have higher levels of distrust.
Asian-Americans most confident about retirement
The 2001 Minority Retirement Confidence Survey (MRCS) shows that almost 72 percent of Asian-Americans report feeling confident they will have enough money to live comfortably throughout their retirement, while only 54 percent of African-Americans and 45 percent of Hispanic-Americans believe the same.
The survey, in its fourth year, is conducted and co-sponsored by Mathew Greenwald & Associates (Greenwald), a Washington, D.C. research firm. Other sponsors include the nonpartisan Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI), and the American Savings Education Council (ASEC). The MRCS is part of the annual Retirement Confidence Survey (RCS) which tracks the behaviors and activities of American workers and retirees (ages 25 and older) as they relate to retirement planning and confidence levels.
"This year’s Minority Retirement Confidence Survey results suggests that demographic and cultural factors may contribute to the differences these specific groups have towards planning for retirement," says Mathew Greenwald, president of Greenwald. "For example, we found in the Hispanic-American population, there are considerable differences between those born in the United States versus those born abroad. Among Asian-Americans, higher levels of education and household income, as well as cultural factors, may impact the higher degee of confidence."
In some instances minority groups are consistent in their beliefs. Six in 10 (62 percent of Hispanic-Americans, 60 percent of African- Americans, and 60 percent of Asian-Americans) in each group believe they will continue working after retirement. Similarly, six in 10 (59 percent of Hispanic-Americans, 61 percent of African-Americans, and 64 percent of Asian-Americans) expect to receive retirement income from an employer through a defined benefit plan.
Additional key findings on minority retirement planning and savings include: Among those who save, 75 percent of Asian-Americans, 70 percent of Hispanic-Americans, and 66 percent of African-Americans have used a work-related savings plan to save for retirement. When those who do not contribute to the retirement plan they are offered by their employer are asked why not, 12 percent of Asian-Americans, 16 percent of Hispanic-Americans and 36 percent of African-Americans say they "can’t afford to" or "need money for obligations."
As for other additional retirement income, 32 percent of Asian-Americans, 29 percent of Hispanic-Americans, and 37 percent of African- Americans expect monetary support from their children or other family members will help support them during this period of their lives.