First E-marketing, Now E-research

By VALERIE MARCHANT

Theglobe.com an online community, had just launched a new website-building service called uPublish!, and research manager Jim Olstrom was naturally eager to know whether his customers were having problems creating their home pages. As recently as last November, he would have had little choice but to wait while a market-research firm surveyed users in order to put together a report he might read two months later. Instead, he turned to InsightExpress, the country's first fully automated online market-research service. Within a few hours Olstrom learned from it that some new customers were finding the directions for uPublish! hard to follow. "We were able to make changes immediately," Olstrom says. Presto! Instant consumer satisfaction.

Interactivity has long been touted as the Internet's most important feature. But only now is that asset being mined by one of our consumer society's most important industries, market research. New tools being provided by companies like InsightExpress seem certain to change the way research is done, as well as broaden the pool of those who will benefit.

Before InsightExpress launched this fall, most of the $5 billion spent annually on market research in the U.S. came from the coffers of huge multinationals like General Motors and Procter & Gamble. A project might cost at least $25,000 and take months to complete. Conventional research firms like Market Facts go through a process that typically involves research design, approval from layers of management, the creation of a survey, selection of a sample population and analysis. By contrast, an InsightExpress survey costs only about $1,000 and takes just a few days. The service provides its clients with survey templates on which to build an online questionnaire; they can choose respondents from 25 demographic groups, decide on a sample size and price, and pay by credit card. InsightExpress then attracts respondents through banner ads posted on appropriate websites. Within a day or two, everyone will have replied, allowing the clients to download the data--all nicely tabulated and graphically presented.

A few other new companies, like Informative and Zoomerang, also offer online services for gathering information, but only InsightExpress has access to a vast universe of respondents. Its parent, NFO Worldwide, based in Greenwich, Conn., provides a ready-made panel of 700,000 people profiled to represent the general U.S. population. InsightExpress' partner, Engage Technologies, delivers banner ads to specific groups among 35 million Internet users.

The new service already has fans. Jack Honomichl, publisher of industry newsletter Inside Research, believes InsightExpress is "revolutionary," partly because "it's fully automated but very personal and interactive." But traditional research still delivers more inclusive samples and data better suited to projections. Jim Spaeth, president of the Advertising Research Foundation, observes that "there could be a problem if it replaces high-quality research." Charles Hamlin, InsightExpress president, agrees: "InsightExpress is an appropriate tool for getting a good sense of the marketplace. If you are making decisions of magnitude, we encourage you to use the traditional market-research industry."