Research Case Study: Vodafone's Youth Market | | INTRODUCTION
This case study will explain how the highly competitive telecommunications market lead Vodafone to set up an on-going 'panel' of respondents to give them a greater understanding of the youth market.

THE CLIENT
Vodafone is probably the biggest success story of the telecommunications market, becoming a household name with a penetration of 29% (TNS Telecoms panel Q3 2001) of the mobile phone market. Vodafone's media and planning agency, OMD UK plays an important strategic role in terms of researching the commercial market.

THE CHALLENGE
Operating in such a highly competitive industry meant that Vodafone had to look at new ways of researching how it could best profit from the hugely competitive youth market. The youth market is defined as anyone aged between 16-24 years old. Currently 90% of all 16-24 year olds own a mobile phone in the UK, amounting to 6.1m people in the UK.

THE SOLUTION
OMD UK, along with 2CV Research, recruited a panel of volunteers who receive monthly questionnaires over a long-term period in order to build up a profile of habits, attitudes and opinions of the young Vodafone user. The panel is made up of 200 respondents, all of whom must have an email address and a mobile phone (this is 85% of the youth market), and is maintained by 2CV.

Questions sent out every month cover a whole range of areas, not just telecommunications. The idea is to build a very comprehensive picture of the Vodafone youth user by examining what their lifestyle and attitudinal habits are. Why? Because Vodafone is looking to optimise its advertising revenue to most effectively target this market, and it needs to understand not only where to target its audience but also how to communicate with it. Utilising the monthly panel of SySurvey volunteers means that Vodafone, OMD UK and 2CV Research can drill down into the psyche of a Vodafone customer in a way that is informative, dynamic and unique, as well as allowing them to respond to ad hoc topics and issues that faces dynaic sectors and categories such as telecoms and youth.

ENDORSEMENT

"SySurvey moved research into the 21st Century, proving that research can be both pro-active, fast and accurate. Now we can reach the elusive and mobile 15-24s comfortably and gauge their opinion when it happens."

Charlotte Nilsson, Research Manager, OMD UK | Case Study: Understanding MTV's Online User | | INTRODUCTION

This case study explains how MTV UK used SySurvey to research its target audience in great depth.

THE CLIENT
MTV is a household name most of us are familiar with, providing satellite, cable and digital TV viewers with a wide range of music channels. MTV’s portfolio includes MTV, MTV Bass, MTV 2 and VH1. It also has a very strong presence online, not only with its key sites like MTV, MTV UK and VH1, but also with its award-winning site, MTV 2.

THE CHALLENGE
MTV's target audience is one of the most clearly defined and some may credit it as one of the market leaders in "youth" targeting. With a heritage of over 20 years MTV has a very clear understanding of its primary TV-viewing target audience. When it came to the Internet the natural progression for MTV was to create a strong web-presence that reflected the brand identities associated with the MTV stations. To make the assumption that the MTV web user would inherit the same identity as the MTV TV viewer, however, would have been naive, and MTV needed to put in place a mechanism that would present them with a better understanding of their web users.

THE SOLUTION

Page impressions can only tell the web site marketer so much about his or her target audience, so MTV devised a comprehensive questionnaire that covered a number of important areas, including hobbies and interests, expenditure on personal goods (including music devices, clothes and going out). The questionnaire was then placed on the MTV web site, along with an incentivisation of CDs for a few lucky winners drawn out of a hat.

As web site users completed the survey MTV was able to produce a detailed profile of its online target audience. Rather than the usual page impressions and site usage figures normally drawn from the log files, MTV was able to drill down into data that produced more robust usage profiles. Putting different site users into different categories allowed MTV to examine lifestyle habits and correlate these back to the site usage patterns. For example, the average female 18 year old who prefers R&B to house music might spend £50 a month on CDs, where as the male equivalent might prefer to spend £50 a month on DVDs. This kind of information allows MTV to better target these individual groups of users.

MTV’s surveys normally run over a 7 day period and achieve their targeted 1,000 responses within this time. MTV continues to use SySurvey for a number of projects across its portfolio of brands. |