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Handbook on Tourism Destinations Branding
While some of this change in goodwill may be attributed to Glasgow’s brand marketing campaign and related media coverage, it is difficult to isolate the brand campaign’s impact from the effect of Glasgow’s winning the bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games during the period over which the research was conducted. Nevertheless, regardless of the reasons, the critical point is that the survey showed the brand in good health, with its key brand values of ‘stylish Scottishness’ or ‘Scottish style’ clearly resonating and growing amongst one of its main target segments.
5.3 Online Panel Surveys In recent years, an online, panel-based approach has become an increasingly popular way to measure a brand’s performance. Research panels are essentially large volumes of respondents who are recruited by research agencies to become respondents in major surveys. Their details are known by the research agency (demographics, media-buying, travel characteristics, etc.) and hence, where there is a need to undertake research with a specific sample of the population, a sample of respondents who qualify can be readily identified. The Glasgow example above used just such an approach – it enabled the identification of respondents who qualified on key lifestyle criteria. Online panel surveys also provide a useful method of accessing customers and potential customers, who can sometimes prove difficult to reach. The main advantages of online panel surveys are: •
Research can be targeted on a specific demographic segment (unlike Omnibus surveys – see below).
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They are one of the least expensive ways of obtaining people’s reactions to a destination.
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The online approach makes it straightforward to incorporate images, sound and video clips to help obtain prompted measures of brand awareness.
Online panel surveys can also ask more questions, as they can be slightly longer than Omnibus, telephone or face-to-face approaches; they are less restricted by some of the ‘time to complete’ issues of interviewer-administered surveys. Nor do they suffer from any ‘interviewer-induced’ effect, which might influence the direction a focus group takes, as they are based on self-completion questionnaires. On the other hand, they do not permit the extent of in-depth emotional investigation that can be undertaken by a live interviewer undertaking a face-to-face brand tracking survey.
5.4 Omnibus-style Surveys ‘Omnibus’ refers to a type of quantitative survey undertaken across a broad audience range, in which data on a wide range of topics and products is collected during the same interview on behalf of several (often many) different clients. This type of survey offers the opportunity to ask limited, specific, relatively simple questions. It is less targeted to any particular market segment than an online panel survey. It therefore does not lend itself to eliciting the qualitative insight that can be obtained from brand tracking surveys (see above) online panel surveys (see above) or visitor satisfaction surveys (see below). It is, however, considerably cheaper to insert one or two questions in a regular Omnibus-style survey than it is to undertake a full brand tracking or visitor satisfaction survey. The Omnibus-style survey can, however, complement these qualitative surveys and provide an element of reinforcement (or possibly contradiction) to the findings from qualitative research. Omnibus-style surveys are probably best suited to asking questions about awareness of, and attitude towards, the destination. Answers to this question can then be measured over time by inclusion of the ETC Member For extranet use, only. Do not forward this document outside of ETC extranet. Copyright © ETC and UNWTO, 2009 – All rights reserved.