Sports Equipment

Integrated agency for consulting and research

Problem

Market Research with Facebook Fans?

Companies are gathering millions of fans in different sport activities around the globe. The rising amount of social relations is a thrilling opportunity to use these relations for market research. The question is: Can we really use our fans as a substitute for commercial recruitment of interviewees? Wht are the effects of a study done with Facebook fans?

Solution

Comparison of panel recruitment with Facebook recruitment

Recruiting Fans from adidas Facebook fansite adidas running Recruiting panelists from panelbiz.
Content: Survey about activities in the field of running and use of technical equipment
Methods: Different scaling approaches; Analytic Hierarchy Process to control consistency

Field Report

Recruiting in market research

Time frame: 3 days panel vs. 53 days on Facebook in 2011
Drop-out: 33,0% Facebook; 7,8% Panel
Languages: German
More information: Slideshare Presentation

Result

Fans differ from a representative sample

Fans are quite deviant in behaviour. Their fanship makes them different in comparison to a general public. Fans can therefore be perfectly used for any kind of innovation research in a specific field. For general questions the fans are less appropriate. On of the main findings was the equality of results in non-topic-related questions.