Smile gets youthful opinions

By SIMON HENDERY marketing writer

As enthusiasm for conducting market research online grows, research company NFO believes it has found a way to tap the opinions of the elusive young and mobile.

It has built them a virtual city.

SmileCity - population 24,000 panellists and growing - is touted as a quick and elegant internet-based research solution.

Its cyber-inhabitants are enticed with the chance to chat, post messages and even contribute an article to the SmileCity Times.

They can earn reward points by filling in a survey, and redeem them after browsing through the reward catalogue.

"This service is focused on getting access to increasingly harder to find respondents, particularly young and highly mobile respondents," said NFO New Zealand managing director Murray Campbell.

"It's also a way of presenting to them a lot of visual ideas of new products, of new packaging, of ads online which are extraordinarily difficult to do through traditional ways of research."

The concept of online research is not new, but Campbell said the size of SmileCity's respondent pool made it unique.

NFO did a deal with Australian research panel-building specialist firm EmailCash to establish the New Zealand panel.

The contract specifies a 30,000 minimum panel size by March next year, a target Campbell said would be reached well before then.

"We have been pleasantly surprised by the rate of growth of the panel."

Campbell said it was getting harder to contact the type of people NFO's clients were wanting to research through conventional means.

"The online panel is a fantastic alternative to connect consumers to our clients - it's a way that is more relevant and more immediate for the respondent, and the dialogue is a lot more powerful than a one-off telephone survey."

In June the company began a study involving 5000 online interviews to monitor respondents' lifestyles, purchasing behaviour and brand attitudes over 12 months.

This week, NFO was commissioned by a company to conduct a 1000-respondent survey online.

Campbell said the significance of that contract was that a large international company was comfortable havings its entire research conducted entirely online.

"You've got a well-established global fast-moving consumer goods company more than happy for the research to conducted entirely online. That to us was a fantastic signal."

For commerical reasons, Campbell would not name the company, but he said the research was to reassess the category drivers of its market and its brand's position within the category.

The market research, which would previously have taken six weeks, could now be completed in six days using the online method.

SmileCity