Cyberal Research

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Lecture 8

• Cyberal Research

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Old/New, Science/Art
Art
Science
Qualitative
Quantitative
Old
Cultural
Cyberal
New
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New Marketing is Cyberal Marketing

• New Economy is situated in Cyberia
• New Marketing is a function of the New
  Economy
• New Marketing Research is a necessary adjunct
  to the New Marketing
• New Marketing Research will be found in Cyberia
• Or will it?

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Nice Thesis, Shame About the Facts

• New Economy subject to old rules
• New Marketing is not so new
• New Marketing Research not needed
• All turn over and go back to sleep

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The E-tailing Revolution

• Promised the end of retailing as we know it
• Everyone on line, why waste time in malls?
• Considerably cheaper, better choice, wider range,
  less hassle
• Rapid growth of E-tailing organisations
  (Amazon.com, EBay, et al)
• Traditional retailers stampede to web (Tesco,
  Toys R Us etc)
• Only to get stuck therein (Tar Baby Effect)

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What Went Wrong?

• Hubris, lack of historical knowledge
• Online shopping offers few advantages
• Sensory shortcomings (sizes, textures, colours,
  freshness)
• Gulf between mouse and house (delay, delivery
  times, disruptions)

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What Went Wronger?

• Mistakes and returns (up to 40)
• Anti-social experience (no crowds, buzz, coffee,
  serendipity, people-watching)
• Deeper anxieties (trust vendor, credit card
  fraud, telephone charges, sluggishness)
• Delivery costs and promotional spend consume
  price savings
• Just not the same (e.g. book browsing, record
  rack shuffling)

8
What Will Happen?

• Shake out of sector (already happening)
• Mergers and consolidation (Wal-Mart/Amazon)
• Successful in certain sectors (books, music,
  travel, financial services, collectables, B2B)
• Successful with certain customer segments (men,
  nerds, nosepickers)
• Settle down to around 5 of total retail sales

9
Netvertising? Not!

• Web as brave new advertising medium
• Driver of the e-comm community
• Underwrite freedom of expression
• Traffic, track, target
• Substitute for business plan

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Hope I Die Before I Get Old

• Better than traditional advertising (weak,
  wasteful)
• Accountable (ads ? sales)
• Non-disruptive (unlike TV/Radio)
• Entertainingly interactive (learn more or less
  about products/services)

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Banner Ad Blues

• Well, I logged on this morning
• Cluttered up screens
• Too many pages
• Not enough advertisers
• Even fewer advertisers as dotcoms collapse
• Vicious circle
• CPM falling rapidly (now 1 per thousand)

12
Half Advertising is Wasted

• Know which half wasted (unlike traditional ads)
• Performance related payment (clicks, purchases
  etc)
• Who is to blame for underperformance (low site
  traffic, poorly designed ad)?
• Web-site publishers work with advertisers to
  rethink concept (expensive)
• Easy to ignore, therefore increasingly instrusive
  (defeats appeal)

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Cyberal Catch-22

• Unless advertisers work harder to to make more
  of the Internet, consumers will continue to
  reject most online advertising. But until
  consumers start clicking more, big advertisers
  will not spend much to improve their offerings.
• (The Economist, 24 Feb. 2001, p. 96)

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Looking For Clues

• Every one of us knows that marketers are out to
  get us, and we all struggle to escape their
  snares. We channel-surf through commercials we
  open our mail over the recycling bin, struggling
  to discern the junk mail without having to open
  the envelope we resent the adhesion of
  commercial messages to everything from sports
  uniforms to escalator risers.
• (The Cluetrain Manifesto, p. 78)

15
The Future is Bright

• Dotcom advertisers replaced with traditional
  marketers
• Greater appreciation of brand building, look
  beyond bottom line
• Top sites still performing well (CPM 30-50 per
  thousand)
• Overall growth in spend, despite US economic
  malaise
• Future growth of Internet
• Historical precedent - radio/TV advertising

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Marketing Research on the Net

• Latest great white hope
• Rushing to exploit the net
• All sorts of research undertaken
• Procedures not available hitherto
• All manner of predictions being made
• Researchers rush to conduct comparative studies
• Specialist providers of cyberal MR

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The Net as Information Resource

• Already accepted as useful by business
• Small business
• useful and cheap research tool for finding about
  about new product ideas, changing environment and
  competition
• Big business
• Internal - integration of knowledge resources for
  multi-nationals
• External - environmental and competitive

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Cyberal Research Structure

• Using the net as a source of secondary
  information
• company information
• consumer information
• Issues and implications in conducting on-line
  research
• quantitative methods
• qualitative methods
• Blurred distinctions in practice

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Cyberal Research Issues

• Great white hype?
• As with other web wonders?
• Difficulties of cyberal research

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Secondary Cyberal Sources(Company)

• Huge amount of company-related information
  available
• Economic/Technological/Cultural/Legal envt.
• Federal government
• Trade associations
• Newspapers
• Competitors web sites
• Secondary data providers (Dun Bradstreet etc)
• Interrogate through search engines meta-search
  engines

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Secondary Cyberal Sources(Consumer)

• General consumer intelligence (Census)
• Specialist data providers (Nielsen)
• Newspapers, magazines etc (FT, WSJ)
• News groups and discussion lists (non
  interventionist, lurking et al)
• Consumers home pages
• Site visits, cookies, casual information gathering

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Newsgroups and Discussion Lists

• Excellent source of consumer information
• Attitudinal and evaluative info, especially
• Archived, ready segmented, marketing-related
  (e.g. brand communities)
• Difference between NG and DL
• Synchronous (chat rooms)
• Asynchronos (e-mail)

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Consumers Home Pages

• Increasingly common
• Wealth of information
• Often marketing related
• Postmodern, brand-mediated identity
• Consumer, not marketer controlled
• Gives real feeling for marketplace
• Compatible with one-on-one ethos

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Web-site Data Capture

• Cookies
• allow a small text file to be saved on your PC
  that tracks your movements on net without your
  knowledge
• Advertisers / web-site owners can gather
  information without consent
• Attaching cookies to banner ads / sites means a
  profile of users and their habits can be obtained
• unwarranted controversy?

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Web-site Data Capture

• Clever web-site design can help in gathering
  information informally
• chat-rooms
• bulletin board systems (BBS)
• Server logs
• specialist software available
• page counter facilities
• Need to integrate learning from web-site
  feedback into value proposition

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Primary Cyberal Research(Quantitative)

• Intuitively appealing
• High speed/
• Low cost
• Geographical reach
• Difficult respondents
• Respondent convenience
• Respondent anonymity
• Immediate analysis
• Incorporate bells and whistles
• Avoid data entry problems

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Primary Cyberal Research(Quantitative)

• Problems with non-cyberal alternatives
• Falling participation rates
• Cost of personal
• Fear of personal
• Practicalities of panels
• Slowness of postal etc

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Primary Cyberal Research(Quantitative)

• Not without difficulties
• Sampling
• Self-selected respondents
• Design of questionnaires
• e-mail
• web survey systems
• Inter-personal nuances
• Identity validation
• Response rates
• Respondents log off readily

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Primary Cyberal Research(Quantitative)

• Sampling
• No database of net users exists
• Number of users growing rapidly and demographic
  profile changing
• Many non-participative users - risk of spamming
  if unsolicitated mailing received
• Implications
• Inability to draw a probability sample
• Difficulty in profiling / segmentation
• Skewed towards affluent males (nerds?,
  obsessives?)

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Primary Cyberal Research(Quantitative)

• Response rates
• Several comparative surveys
• Faster yes, but RRs consistently lower
• Contact failings
• RRs getting worse!
• Lost novelty
• But, cheap, cheap, cheap...

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Primary Cyberal Research(Quantitative)

• Consumer Panels
• given problems difficult to get representative
  members (for broader population)
• continual need for update due to changing
  demographics of users
• need for careful validation of panel members
• panels need to be large to be effective
• Implications
• labour intensive for maintenance

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Primary Cyberal Research(Quantitative)

• Proper netiquette
• Non-intrusiveness paramount
• Respect privacy
• Keep it short
• Use incentives
• Wary of newsgroups
• Employ professionals

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Primary Cyberal Research(Quantitative)

• Advantages
• Large sample possible quickly and cheaply
• Immediate analysis (no need for input)
• Cost factor
• Disadvantages
• Non-completion
• Identity validation
• Lost its novelty

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Primary Cyberal Research(Qualitative)

• Online Groups Greatest Potential of All?
• Considerably cheaper
• travel
• catering
• venue
• Much more efficient
• screening
• transcripts
• control of group

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Primary Cyberal Research(Qualitative)

• Access to and character of participants
• widely scattered
• business executives
• personal convenience
• Sensitive topics
• increased anonymity
• more openness

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Primary Cyberal Research(Qualitative)

• Not without difficulty
• Identity validation
• High attrition rates (no one person/venue)
• Need for shorter sessions (no presence)
• Loss of non-verbals (tactile)
• Lack of synergy
• Less sociable
• Role of moderator

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Primary Cyberal Research(Qualitative)

• Transcripts immediately available
• But still have to be analysed
• Encourages superficiality
• Text based, no visuals (e.g. videotape of
  session)
• Loss of intangibles (silence, tone of voice)
• Compensate with emoticons -)

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Primary Cyberal Research(Qualitative)

• Tap into newsgroups (antagonism)
• Set up chat room on website (casual)
• Use of specialist cyberal researchers
• w3focus.com
• surveysite.com
• kingbrown.com
• Mixed methods, shoulder surfing

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Cyberal Research Problems

• Coping with amount of information
• Sheer work, drudgery, sifting (through newsgroup
  inanities, for example)
• Shoulder surfing distortions
• Reliability and integrity of information
• Ethics and etiquette of cyberal research
• Ethos of net, anti-marketing
• Cookies controversy

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Cyberal Research Issue

• Do people tell the truth
• Do they respond in character (s)
• Avatars, identities, personae proliferation
• On the web, no-one knows youre a dog
• Implications for representative sample
• Marketers naively assume theyre being told the
  truth
• Yet web anti-marketing, info even less likely to
  be true/reliable

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Anti-Marketing Mindset

• Every one of us knows that marketers are out to
  get us, and we all struggle to escape their
  snares. We channel-surf through commercials we
  open our mail over the recycling bin, struggling
  to discern the junk mail without having to open
  the envelope we resent the adhesion of
  commercial messages to everything from sports
  uniforms to escalator risers.
• (The Cluetrain Manifesto, p. 78)

42
Mitchells Marketing Manifesto

• Consumers are becoming marketing literate.
  They know they are being stimulated and are
  developing a resistance to these stimuli, even
  learning how to turn the tables. Consumers
  increasingly refuse to buy at full price, for
  example, knowing that a sale is just around the
  corner. They have fun deconstructing
  advertisements. The observed has started playing
  games with the observer.
• (Alan Mitchell, Right Side Up, p.60)

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Real Research Issue

• Lack of imagination of marketing researchers
• Old ideas/techniques adapted to web
• Retronet strikes again
• Need to think cyberal research anew
• The web is a foreign country, they do things
  differently there
• Internet as cultural rather than commercial force

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Doing Cyberal Research I

• Process of conducting the research
• Define the research issue and the target market
• Identify newsgroups and Internet communities to
  study
• Identify specific topics for discussion
• Subscribe to pertinent groups, register in
  communities
• Search discussion group topics and content lists
  to find the target market
• Search e-mail discussion groups lists
• Subscribe to filtering services that monitor
  groups
• Read FAQs and instructions of your competitor
• Enter chat rooms, whenever possible

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Doing Cyberal Research II

• Content of the research instrument
• Post strategic queries to news groups
• Post surveys on your Web site
• Offer rewards for participation
• Post strategic queries on your Web site
• Post relevant content to groups with a pointer to
  your Web site survey
• Post a detailed survey in special e-mail
  questionnaires
• Create a chat room and try to build a community
  of consumers

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Cyberal Research Exercise I

• Using various search engines find out information
  on the following
• EU policy on Electronic Commerce
• Number of net users by country world-wide
• Marketing conferences in the USA
• Make notes on your experience
• Speed / time taken, frustrations, short-cuts,
• Best search engines and why

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Cyberal Research Exercise II

• Examine the websites of cyberal researchers
• sri.com
• activmedia.com
• headcount.com
• clickz.com
• intellifact.com
• nielsenmedia.com
• Explore the following chatrooms
• habbohotel.com
• mobiledisco.com