Access panels

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Question - why do you need an access panel?

Answer - to get cheap, fast market research.

Key points

Access panels are a marketing research methodology whereby a group of people sign up to respond on a regular basis to surveys.

These can be open or proprietary. Open access panels are set up by marketing research agencies, and anyone can plug into them for a fee – so they are a form of omnibus survey, but with a pre-selected group of respondents. Proprietary access panels are exclusive to one client, and are generally used to track behaviors and attitudes over time.

The main advantages of access panels are:

• Continuity of response and statistical confidence: so long as most of the panellists reply to each survey, you do not need to worry so much about statistics. If there is a difference recorded between the results of one survey and of another, this is likely to be a statistically significant difference
• Increasingly rich individual profiles: because each respondent answers questions during each wave, there are more and more valuable profile data for that individual which can be explored via data mining techniques
• The ability to have people keep diaries: diaries can be an extremely rich source of insight into individual’s attitudes and behaviors, capturing more accurate information than you would be likely to get when people simply answer questions based on their recall of a situation
• Greater involvement in your business: in the case of proprietary access panels, if you select specific customers to be on your access panel, you are building stronger relationships with them merely by the fact of consulting them as experts on a regular basis. If you conduct new product development research, those customers who were involved in the research are more likely to buy the new product when it is launched. You are giving these customers privileged access to you and massaging their egos – most of us like that
• Speed: again in the case of proprietary access panels, if you want to test an idea quickly, you can fire it at your access panel and get rapid feedback on your idea. This is particularly useful for communications testing. To an extent, the more you ask members of the access panel to contribute their ideas, the more they are committed to responding. There are, of course, limits to this

The main disadvantages of access panels are:

• Keeping them going: there will always be some fall-out from a panel. Keeping people motivated to respond to each survey is a major issue
• Expert respondents: the whole point of marketing research is to get information from people who are representative of your market. However, members of access panels begin over time to think rather differently from their peers because they view situations from the point of view of a research expert rather than as an ordinary member of the public or a typical customer. This means that your data can become less valid
• Bias: in the case of proprietary panels, respondents are likely to know, or to guess, who you are. This builds a bias into their responses for any questions directly relating to how they think about you, or dealing with situations with which you are strongly associated

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