Online research is now commonplace around the world and in Latin America; however, while it is beginning to take hold in Uruguay, it is still in its infancy. This was the point made by Alain Mizrahi—director of Grupo Radar and professor at the School of Business and Social Sciences—on May 21 during a conference held at Universidad ORT Uruguay titled “Market Research in the Digital Age.”
The event was part of the faculty's Graduate School's series of management and business lectures.
According to ESOMAR (the European Society for Opinion and Market Research), in 2013, 24% of the global revenue of market research firms came from online research. In contrast, revenue from quantitative telephone research accounted for 12%.
While Japan was the country with the highest share of online sales in the world—accounting for 46% of the total—in Uruguay, that figure was 0%.
Mizrahi set out to find an answer. He wondered if the problem was low internet penetration. However, according to the Uruguayan Internet User Profile —a survey conducted by Grupo Radar—internet penetration stands at 74%, a figure higher than the country’s average landline penetration rate, which is 64%. Furthermore, Uruguay has the highest percentage of Facebook users relative to the total population in all of Latin America and the Caribbean.
“It’s a misconception that Facebook is just a global hangout for teenagers with nothing better to do. It is that, but it’s also a powerful marketing tool with a much lower cost per contact and a much higher return on investment than any other traditional communication tool,” he said.
Responsibility lies with both sides. According to the speaker, companies are “reluctant to trust online market research methods.” However, he said it is necessary to examine what researchers are doing wrong.
In addition, academia carries significant weight, and from the perspective of the veteran social researcher, online social research is “heresy that breaks the mold and calls into question everything we’ve learned before.”
He compared it to what happened when telephone surveys first began. They were accused of being invalid, unreliable, or unrepresentative. “Today, no one questions their validity,” he noted. Even so, for Mizrahi, they are “new, valid tools that need to be incorporated.”
They offer numerous advantages. For starters, the cost difference is significant. For a 15-minute in-person survey, you have to pay the interviewer about $150 per respondent. However, the cost of an online survey is only $30 per respondent.
In addition, they also take different amounts of time. A face-to-face survey of 1,000 respondents would take about a month to complete, whereas an online survey would take only a day.
“The amount of information we can gather simply by observing and recording what happens on social media is staggering,” Mizrahi noted. During the election campaign, 1.5 million tweets were sent. So, for the director of Radar, monitoring social media has become a “fascinating investigative tool.”
He also shared his experience conducting online polls on voter intentions in Uruguayan elections. He noted that in the 2015 departmental elections, the method worked very well in some departments and very poorly in others.
However, in the 2014 national elections, the weighted results of the online polls were the closest to the final results. This does not call into question the validity of the data collection method, but it does indicate that the data from the raw sample must be “better adjusted according to known real-world variables.”
“The possibilities that are opening up are endless. Online research will not replace traditional methods; rather, it offers the opportunity to broaden the scope of research and think outside the box: it allows us to be more creative in both quantitative and qualitative research,” he stated.