Online Customer Panels

Everyone knows about SurveyMonkey and Web analytics programs, but I heard about something new (at least to me) last week—online market research. I attended an AMA Webcast on Community Marketing on March 29 where one of the topics was how to attract online customer panels that provide high quality market research.

I've seen lots of focus groups before, but the market research is shallow—customers sit there for a couple of hours and react to some product concepts. I've also used customer panels, where you meet regularly with the same group of customers over a period of time, but getting the customers together is very expensive.

Online customer panels seems like a great new way to get some of the benefits of focus groups and customer panels without a lot of the drawbacks. Panels can be long-term, so you can get very deep research. Customers can interact with each other, as in a focus group. It costs very little, compared to other methods.

Del Monte Foods operates the “