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Marketers
Hit the Polls
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Business New Haven
11/16/1998
By: Deborah Ketai
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AcuPoll Precision Research demonstrated real-time, interactive polling for area marketing professionals recently at a meeting of the Connecticut chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA).
AcuPoll proclaims itself the U.S. leader in new concept screening for Fortune 100 corporations. Companies hire AcuPoll to gauge consumer reaction to proposed new products or advertising campaigns - before spending a bundle on production, marketing and distribution. AcuPoll's proprietary process combines the flexibility and qualitative strengths of focus groups with some of the quantitative capabilities of surveys.
The AMA demo gave participants a sense of an actual session set-up. Participants sat at rows of long tables in a banquet room at the Hartford Club. In front of each person, a small black box bore a row of 11 buttons, marked only at the endpoints: zero and ten.
Typically, the only person at the front of the room is a moderator, who leads participants briskly through the test questions and concepts from prepared booklets. As participants register their responses by pressing buttons, the results appear instantaneously in graphic and numeric form on a projection screen at the back of the room.
Unseen by participants, the client (and possibly a representative from the client's advertising agency) sits with AcuPoll personnel and watches the results come in. As in a focus group, clients can respond to unexpected responses in midstream by asking the moderator to switch gears and explore consumers' likes and dislikes with open-ended questions.
For example, the facilitator might engage participants in a brief, spirited discussion about what would make them more receptive to a particular concept. The group generates several possibilities; the facilitator writes them on a flip chart or dry-erase board, then asks the participants to vote on them. Because votes are essentially anonymous, given the speed of the questions and the participants' individual polling sets, the process avoids much of the dominance effect that plagues focus groups.
For the demo, AcuPoll's Rick Seybold set up the projection screen in the front of the room, while AMA members and guests played consumer for half an hour. With an associate handling the technical end, Seybold acted as moderator, interpreted the results and explained how real sessions differ from the demo.
Actual polling sessions involve 100 to 200 participants answering 275 to 450 questions over the course of either 90 minutes or three hours. Participants are selected through a telephone-screening process that ensures a random sample within the client-specified demographic quotas. Consumers typically receive $65 to take part in a session; professionals and business executives may receive incentives of $75-$300 to participate in studies for business-to-business clients.
Perhaps the most attractive aspect of AcuPoll's process is the time frame: around three weeks from beginning to end of a project. A topline report is available within 24 hours of the session; the final report is ready within a week.
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