Market research firm Harris Interactive today announced that it is partnering with Google’s recently launched Google Consumer Surveys “to develop and bring to market a new product that allows businesses, both large and small, to compare themselves to industry benchmarks at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research.” Using Google’s Consumer Surveys platform, Harris Interactive will now collect and distribute industry benchmarks. Businesses will be able to run their own surveys (for a price) and benchmark themselves against their competitors.
Market Research Through Surveywalls
Google Consumer Surveys is meant to make consumer market surveys easy for businesses. The interesting twist here is that users virtually have to answer your question as Google is positioning its surveys as alternatives to traditional newspaper paywalls. Instead of paying, users have to answer a few questions to get to the content they are interested in. Marketers can use these “surveywalls” to ask basic multiple-choice questions or to run more complex studies; Google charges $0.10 per response for the general U.S. population and $0.50 per response from custom audiences (a portion of which it then passes on to the site owners).
“We are excited to be involved in a venture that has the potential to reinvent the manner in which market research is conducted,” said Al Angrisani, Harris Interactive’s CEO and president, in a canned statement today. “This is a unique opportunity to bring together Google’s innovative Consumer Surveys product with Harris Interactive’s expertise in delivering credible insights to the global business community.”
The first result of this collaboration is a study of people’s opinions of their banks. Users can use Google Survey’s interactive user interface (which our own Greg Ferenstein finds very huggable) to drill down deeper into these results, and smaller banks now benchmark themselves against their larger competitors.
