GMI Newsletter

The GMI IT Specialty Panel has increased dramatically in reach and depth during Q4 of this year, and currently has a member base of 75,000 panelists and a reach of 1.2 million worldwide. The panel, comprised of IT professionals, executives, staff members and more, provides a vital link to the technology industry. It encompasses a range of fields, including software development, security, network administration and desktop support. The panel has a retention rate of 96%, due largely to the fact that GMI IT panelists are highly engaged and uniquely incentivized based on their area of interest.

In addition to the wide array of IT panelists available, GMI has recently introduced a growing panel of certified, industry-leading IT professionals. For a premium, these panelists may be accessed to complete highly specialized studies. Members of this panel have scored in the top 15% on IT certification tests, have an extremely high functional competency, and are leaders in their field. These panelists are available now - let your technology research benefit from their expertise today!

GMI ramps up its service offerings

With the recent acquisition of Appian Analytics, based in San Ramon, Calif., GMI now offers its clients the option to outsource their data preparation for expert decision support interrogation, analysis, visualization, manipulation and reporting. With the combined efforts of an offshore team operating 24x7x365 and an onshore team with 30+ years of experience in managing data, this new service is scalable and effective at meeting your most demanding project timelines. GMI's new capabilities feature data processing and automation, as well as dashboards and visualization.

In particular, GMI now offers clients interactive dashboards of study results. The data model is developed under the dashboard and provides automated or real-time updates while you slice and dice your data, drill down into the details of your research, and review your study's summary metrics in a powerfully illustrated and succinct presentation. View your dashboard on a secure website or in Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF.

GMI's continual investments in technology, methodologies and experienced specialists allow clients to focus their resources more on understanding their customers' needs, while maintaining high-quality research standards.

Click testing: An alternative to eye movement tracking

Click testing is a powerful online diagnostic research technique that can be used to evaluate everything from advertising and editorial layouts to product design.

Respondents are simply asked to click with their mouse on the elements they notice most on a page presenting visual stimulus material. After consolidating the results from 200 to 300 respondents, a visual heat map can be produced highlighting the elements that are noticed most frequently on that page.

The technique very closely mirrors the results of eye movement tracking surveys, but with the added advantage that it can be undertaken at a fraction of the cost and with rapid turnaround times. Click testing has proved highly successful for a wide range of applications, including:

Through its acquisition of Media Intelligence, GMI now offers a specialist module for conducting quick and efficient click testing. The Media Intelligence team has developed a highly innovative reporting module to view the results from click testing by animating click activity in real time through the creation of visual click heat maps.

The speed and powerful diagnostic capabilities of click testing enables this technique to be used extensively across all industry sectors for:

"We have been pioneering the use of click testing for a wide variety of advertising evaluation tasks, including product design testing, advertising evaluation and media placement testing, and it is proving to be one of the most powerful advertising evaluation techniques out there," explains Jorge B. Jensen, research director for Universal McCann based in Oslo, Norway. "The way click tests integrate questionnaire design, data harvesting and reporting is truly unique."

GMI customer case studies

VisitBritain's mission is to promote Britain as a world-class tourist destination and develop England's visitor economy by creating world-class destination brands and marketing campaigns. VisitBritain has representatives in 36 countries around the world, and has expanded into China, throughout Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia in the last three years alone.

In 2005, 30 million overseas visitors came to Britain (8% more than in 2004), spending some £14.2 billion in the country (9% more than in 2004). In order to keep generating additional revenue throughout Britain all year round, VisitBritain needed to improve its understanding of how Britain is perceived in other countries around the globe. In the summer of 2005, the company turned to the Anholt Nation Brands Index (NBI), the first analytical ranking of the world's nation brands created by government advisor Simon Anholt and powered by GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.).

Each quarter, the NBI gathers the real-time perceptions of over 25,000 online consumers in 35 countries across six areas of national competence (Investment and Immigration, Exports, Culture and Heritage, People, Governance and Tourism), a unique barometer of global opinion adding up to a clear measurement of national brand power in those 35 countries. The NBI also features a guest country each quarter.

"The development of a powerful destination brand is a key part of our strategy for attracting more visitors to the UK," explains Nicky Cronin, VisitBritain's research executive based in London, UK. "Perceptions of and attitudes towards nations are a complex blend of experiences developed over long periods of time and across a number of dimensions, many of which are surveyed as part of the NBI."

To gain some insights that are more relevant to its specific needs, VisitBritain commissions additional tourism questions each quarter as part of the NBI, ranging from sightseeing in the city to visiting the countryside. These questions are added to the NBI's regular quarterly survey questionnaire and sent to GMI's international panel of respondents, which provides reach to six million consumers in 200+ countries and territories worldwide.

"The ability to add specific questions to the NBI hugely adds value to our activities. As part of our quarterly NBI subscription, we get a custom report authored by nation branding expert Simon Anholt providing us with a top-line summary of the main research findings, as well as the raw research data, which we can then analyze in our own time to generate additional insights into how Britain's people and culture are perceived abroad," concludes Nicky Cronin. "The NBI is a much more cost-effective way for us to gain access to valuable global intelligence than to conduct our own ad-hoc research, making it easier for us to identify strengths, weaknesses and shifting perceptions over time. This enables our local teams to make much better-informed decisions quicker, and make a real positive difference in the way they promote Brand Britain locally to attract more visitors to our beautiful country year after year."

For many years, employee surveys have been at the forefront of geva-institut's work (Gesellschaft für Verhaltensanalyse und Evaluation mbH based in Munich, Germany). The organization conducts surveys on behalf of companies with offices, factories and subsidiaries overseas to help them better understand the multicultural differences in research findings.

The main objective of geva-institut's job satisfaction survey was to compare and contrast how employees of various economic and cultural backgrounds perceive working conditions and career prospects.

In order to be able to conduct the survey across 25 countries, geva-institut chose GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.) as its online data collection and panel provider. Surveys conducted via phone or in person would traditionally require comprehensive coordination with local partners in each country. Using GMI's panel, which offers reach to six million consumers in 200+ countries and territories around the globe, geva-institut could gather the data of their study quickly, with only minimal staff-related expenses.

A total of 11,027 panelists were invited to take part in the study. In order to ensure the panel was of highest quality, GMI leveraged several types of control mechanisms. Criteria such as double-opt-in at registration and some testing during the survey assured the respondents' credibility. In addition, geva-institut had comparable figures at hand resulting from similar surveys previously conducted in Germany, and the results matched perfectly with those that GMI provided.

About 150 panelists applied for the results of the study, demonstrating the high level of commitment of the panel to the survey. "For us, online data collection was the perfect approach to conduct our project," explains Gerhard Bruns, CEO of geva-institut. "We will continue to work with GMI by updating our benchmarks on a regular basis and extending our survey to other countries in the future."

geva-institut conducted their job satisfaction study in the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Czech Republic, Turkey, the UK and the USA.

GMI opens new technology center in Colombo, Sri Lanka

GMI announces the opening of a new technology center, just five miles away from the heart of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Colombo team is responsible for building a better, faster, more feature-rich MyGMI workflow management system, and contributing to the high-quality code base already established for that product.

The center has also begun recruiting .NET talent to accelerate development of innovative Research Analyzer features.

Best practices: Worth the effort

By Jarad Carleton, Frost & Sullivan, courtesy of Quirk's Marketing Research Review Magazine.

GMI tip of the month

New demo: How to use MyGMI

Access your real-time proposals, projects, studies and invoices 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! Watch this training demo to learn how to use MyGMI tools for effective project management and communication. It's fast and easy. Click here for more details.

Duration: 10 minutes
Time to download: 2-4 minutes
Speakers required

Who's new at GMI

Darren Chiu, Associate Director, Technical Account Management - Seattle, USA
Eric Miao, Assistant Manager, Inside Sales - Shanghai, China
Daisy Wang, Sales Director - Shanghai, China

December 2006 GMI Newsletter

GMI grows IT specialty panel by 250% in Q4

GMI ramps up its service offerings

Click testing: An alternative to eye movement tracking

GMI customer case studies

GMI opens new technology center in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Best practices: Worth the effort

GMI tip of the month

Who's new at GMI