Clients

Synovate MMI

MMI, is part of the Synovate Group, and is the second largest research agency in Norway. It is a well-known name, recognised by about 95% of the Norwegian population. MMI surveys on a wide variety of subjects, for example:

• Political Polls
• Testing the effectiveness of advertisements
• Concept testing with new products and services
• Brand maintenance
• Consumption studies
• Medical research

To achieve this MMI runs a panel of 45,000 people using MARSC as the panel management tool interfacing with MI Pro interviewing software. These panellists, on average, are contacted about once every 3 weeks.

Norway has a small population of about 4.4 million. A large proportion of this population is well informed and well educated, and has high media consumption. MMI’s approach to surveying has to reflect the expectations of this population.

MMI recognise that the craftsmanship behind the management of their panel enables them to get the most out of their research. It is the little things that count and build up trust: the tone of all communications with panellists, the handling of incentives and the implementation of good disciplines that ensure panellists are treated well. MMI find that panellists who are treated well are both responsive and give good quality answers.

The MARSC solution

Effective control of the panel data is needed in order to maintain these disciplines, for example it is important that panellists are not contacted too frequently as they are then more likely to leave the panel. So MMI uses MARSC’s re-contact rules in their sample selection as these prohibit use of the same contact too often.

One of the traps MMI has identified in panel research is presenting all panellists with one big questionnaire, which covers a variety of subjects and asks detailed questions about each subject area. This tempts the researcher to contact all panellists too often and bore them with long, involved questionnaires. Long surveys tend to result in poor quality responses, and contacting panellists too often results in response rates dropping.

Key to MMI’s success is to ask the whole panel only general questions (demographics, age, sex, etc) and then to extract sub-groups based on the answers for more detailed information about specific topics. This avoids using the whole panel, leaving much of it free for other use, and it also allows them to target only the most interested audiences for a particular topic. MMI believe this is the best method to get good quality information from a panel on an on-going basis.

MMI also use MARSC for easy generation of top-up sample. It is a common feature of even the bestmanaged research project that the response rate is lower than initially expected, and MMI regularly generate a top-up sample when this happens. MARSC calculates the response rate history for that project and provides exactly what sample is required in each quota cell.

MARSC enables the import of fresh information about panellists from previous surveys. If respondents have been asked questions on a particular topic, this information can be fed back into MARSC and used as the basis for the next sample selection. As an example, MMI is running a food panel where they choose only people who eat yoghurt to answer detailed questions about yoghurt.

As a direct result of the reputation that MMI has built up and their careful management of the panel, MMI get very good response rates and high quality information. They have a more stable panel, because people stay with them for longer. Also, because of the element of trust and respect they can ask sensitive questions as in a recent poll about Viagra, and get appropriate replies.

Next steps

MMI is now preparing to take its panel one step further to launch a "panel-within-panel" concept where special interest sub-panels are kept within the main panel, allowing single-source, longitude analysis for a client or a research-category. This concept also includes multi-channel interviewing where the delivery channels (e.g. phone or email) can be selected based on panelist preferences or methodological considerations.

"MARSC has enabled us to manage our panel in the way that suits our company philosophy and delivers high quality results."
Rune Eilertsen - Panel Manager - Synovate MMI