Market Knowledge

Gallup's Top 10 World News Findings of 2012. http://www.gallup.com/poll/159593/gallup-top-world-news-findings-2012.aspx

Gallup's Top 10 World News Findings of 2012 Gallup reviews its top 10 world news findings of 2012 based on surveys conducted in more than 140 countries through the Gallup World Poll.

The Importance (or otherwise) of Political Polls.

Unless you’ve been hiding somewhere recently, you’d probably know the US Presidential Election dominated the airwaves for quite some time. It felt like the US election got more coverage that our own.

And integral to that coverage was the predictions made by the polls. This seemed to be oxygen for many in the press, as they could speculate as to what might happen based on these predictions. I lost count of the number of times I heard ‘too close to call’.

For me, the big winner wasn’t Obama, but these political polls. But as a market researcher, that’s not a particularly surprising comment. Now I’m no expert on polling – I know a bit, and importantly what makes a good and bad one, and how to read them.

What was surprising for those who took more than a passing interest in the significant number of polls was the variability in the results. The Economist had a great graphic (linked) which allowed a little more investigation. You could view the overall result, or look at results on a state by state basis, and over time. In some states, the results varied by 3 or 4 percentage points in a single day. Now I know the politicians would like to think that they are they persuasive and can move the masses. But the more likely reason would be the variability in the polls themselves (the questions and the methodological approach).

Which brings me to the point of this article, is that not all polls are the same, so it follows that not all market research is the same either. There is good, accurate and representative research which will provide clear direction and there is research which isn’t.

And importantly there is different levels/skills of interpretation. As we now know the US election wasn’t ‘too close to call’, it was an easy result to pick, if you knew how to read the polls.

-PD

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/11/us-election-2012?fsrc=nlw|newe|11-5-2012|4053512|81881919|AP

Alcohol Pricing and Behaviour - September 2012:

A little while ago I attended the celebration of all things beer, Beervana, in Wellington. The on-going discussion about alcohol pricing and behaviour naturally came up during the course of the event, and again recently with government debating the minimum purchase age. Government has made their intentions known, which was to basically keep things as they are.

I’ve undertaken numerous market research investigations into the impact of price on behaviour, and the general principle is as you’d expect – increase the price, decrease the purchasing. There are, as always, exceptions. An expensive car at a low price is always suspicious.

I’m reminded of work undertaken by a University of Canterbury academic, where he reviewed a large number of academic articles into the general subject of alcohol purchasing and consumption. The short story was an increase in price reduces the number of people who purchase. But the critical aspect of this was which groups of people stopped purchasing at which price points. Causal infrequent drinkers were the first to change their behaviour when the price increased, while the last group to make a change were the heavy consumers (if memory serves me correctly, when the price was at least 2.5 times higher than ‘normal’).

And it comes back to the fundamental proposition of who’s behaviour needs to be altered? Using a crude tool like pricing will change behaviour, but not necessarily the behaviour of the group you’d like to change. Rather than changing the price of alcohol, why not change the behaviour that results. Those few who abuse alcohol and create mayhem could always be asked to pay for their actions. That would be a far more effective approach to change behaviour.

-PD