I. 4 techniques to recruit market research respondents "How do you recruit respondents? If only we had a penny for every time a client asked us this question! This is a very good question and that is why we thought we would tell you a bit more about recruiting for market research. Recruitment is a crucial component of any market research project and plays a great part in the success or failure of your market research study. Knowing who to speak to and interviewing the right target audience is central to collecting the necessary data to produce actionable insights. While some participants are relatively easy to recruit, others are much harder to recruit. And, unsurprisingly, this level of difficulty is reflected in the recruitment costs and the project timelines. In other words, the harder the recruitment, the more expensive it is and the longer it takes. Participants to a market research study are typically recruited in one or a mixture of 4 of the following ways. 1. List Recruitment Participants may be recruited from a list provided by the client (e.g. a list of their customers or prospects) or bought from a list provider. Pros of lists Contact details are available and in an easy-to-use format Lists and database contains most of the information you need to in an easily exploitable format. Lists speed up the recruitment process Lists and database are also time savers because they provide the key contact details such as names, phone numbers and/or email addresses in one single place. Lists are especially efficient when used in a call centre setting with an auto dialler, which automates tasks such as dialling and callbacks. The auto dialler speeds up recruitment by increasing productivity per hour by 200-300% . Cons of lists Lists may contain incorrect information Watch out for incorrect or out-of-date information! At Intelligent Insights, we’ve lost track of the number of times we have been told that someone has left the organisation, has retired or, even worse, has died. Try and clean up any lists before you start using them. Remove any duplicates, check entries with similar details. Check emails and telephone numbers to make sure they follow the right format. Lists must be opt-in Above all, make sure that the people on the list gave their consent to be contacted for market research. Whether buying a list from a list provider or using a list provided by the client, make sure that the contacts are all opt-in only (single opt-in or double opt-in) and that the list can be used for market research purposes. You risk being blacklisted by mailing software providers if you contact people who did not expressly give their consent and you will also fall foul of personal data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) in the European Union or the UK GDPR. If you are reported to regulatory bodies, you will be liable to hefty fines and penalties. 2. Proprietary database recruitment or Panel recruitment A proprietary database or panel typically contains the details of past market research participants who agreed to be contacted again or of people who voluntarily subscribed to the panel to take part in market research studies. Pros of a participant database or panel Databases and panels are a highly efficient way of recruiting market research participants Proprietary databases or panels are the safest and most effective way of recruiting market research participants. With databases and panels, the members’ profiles and the contact details are already available, making it easier to decide who to invite to take part in the study, saving you both time and money. Participants recruited from databases and panels are more likely to qualify Having preliminary information about those individuals also helps to determine which panellists or past respondents are more likely to qualify for the study. Cons of a participant database or panel Databases and panels are not very useful if you need to recruit a brand new the target audience Databases and panels work on the basis that they contain members with profiles similar or identical to the target audience of the new study and with a relatively high incidence rate. If you are trying to recruit new or niche profiles, they are unlikely to be of much use unless, of course, the list provider or panel specialises in niche target audiences. Panels require a high level of investment Panels require time, money, software, and staff to collect and maintain up-to-date the contact details and profiles of thousands of potential participants. Not all agencies have the inclination or resources for it. 3. Free find recruitment When not enough or no participants can be found in an agency’s database or panel, a list bought or provided by the client, the only option left is to recruit outside of the database, panel or list. Participants then have to be found from other sources. This is what is called “free find” recruitment. Pros of free find recruitment Panels and databases are by definition limited by their size and composition. With free find recruitment participants can be found from a wide variety of sources, making it possible to find even the most niche respondents. Cons of free find recruitment Free find recruitment requires inquisitive recruiters that can think outside the box One thing’s for sure, free find recruitment is definitely not for the unmotivated or unimaginative recruiter. Free find recruitment requires good desk research skills and, above all, thinking outside the box to find the most likely places where you will find the names and contact details of the people you require. Free find recruitment is more costly and more time consuming Unlike lists, databases and panels where the names, contact details and other profiling details are conveniently located in one single file, free find recruitment requires looking in various places to piece together the information necessary to assess the suitability of a profile and locate contact details. This piecemeal approach is a lot less productive, resulting in higher recruitment costs and longer timelines. 4. Snowball recruitment (snowballing sampling) Snowballing is a recruitment technique that involves asking current participants to refer other respondents. Pros of snowball recruitment Snowball recruitment is a useful technique for hard-to-reach respondents Snowballing is quite an effective way of recruiting participants when all other recruitment options have been exhausted and/or the target audience is difficult to reach. Snowballing is particularly useful at the end of a study when the recruitment effort has lost momentum and the recruiters are struggling to recruit the last few respondents. Cons of snowball recruitment Snowball recruitment is a slower process Recruitment through snowballing is slower because respondents are usually asked to refer other people only once they have taken part in the study themselves. Recruitment through snowball sampling is more expensive Snowballing relies on existing participants referring other people to the study. This technique often involves incentivising them for their help. The referral fees paid increase the overall cost of recruitment. II. 3 factors impacting market research It’s important to consider how difficult the target audience will be to reach and recruit when choosing a technique because the choice of technique is often linked to how difficult the target audience will be to reach. 1. The incidence rate The incidence rate refers to the percentage of people eligible and invited to participate in a given study. The incidence rate is an important marker in market research as it reveals the level of difficulty associated with reaching a given target audience. Unfortunately, very often, the incidence rate is not known before research is started. However, an experienced agency such as Intelligent Insights is able to estimate how difficult recruitment is likely to be based on different aspects such as the profile of the target audience or a market specificity. 2. The response rate The response rate is also an important metric in market research. It indicates, as a percentage, the number of people who actually took part in a market-research study. This figure is useful to establish how likely people are to take part in the study and whether more people have to be contacted in order to improve your chances of reaching your sample size. Generally speaking, the response rate is likely to be higher in B2C research and if you already have an established relationship with the participants. According to Smartsurvey, “typical survey response rates can lie anywhere in the region between the 5% to 30% range”. How successful you are in recruiting participants depends, of course, greatly on the nature of your study, the target audience, the methodology used to recruit and conduct the research. 3. The target audience The target audience is the sector(s) or group(s) of people that the market research project aims to find out information about. The target audience has a big impact on how easy or difficult recruitment will be. Before research starts, you should have a clear idea of who your target audience is but it may be that you only find out after the research has started. Define your target audience before you start your market research study In order to narrow down who your research targets with as much accuracy as possible, you should conduct some preliminary research yourself (or ask an agency such as Intelligent Insights to do it for you) to find out more about your target audience. This will save you time and money when the main research takes place. Be realistic about your qualifying criteria The qualifying criteria (or eligibility criteria) depend on your market research needs and information objectives. But generally speaking, the less strict your criteria are, the bigger the population you can recruit from, the lower the recruitment costs and the shorter the timelines will be overall. III. How to recruit hard-to-reach market research participants “How do you recruit hard-to-reach market research participants?” is another popular question. Well, the short answer is “with a lot of elbow grease”. They are not called “hard-to-reach participants” for nothing! Niche respondents such as C suites, experts and patients with rare diseases are particularly challenging to recruit, because of the lack of lists and the small universe sizes. Increase the project timeline and project budget For these types of respondents, we usually recommend our clients allocate more time for the recruitment phase of their research project and also more budget due to the extra difficulty. Involve the study sponsor or client agency in the recruitment process We strongly recommend getting the sponsor and/or the client agency involved in the recruitment process, e.g. by sharing potential profiles with them before the recruits’ participation is confirmed. This will reduce the risk of the respondents being found unsuitable after they have been recruited and/or interviewed. 1. How do you recruit experts and C Suite participants? Whatever you call them (experts, key opinion leaders, key opinion formers, key opinion influencers, etc.) recruiting experts is not an easy task. It is just as tricky recruiting top managers. Finding and recruiting senior managers and people with demonstrable expertise, experience and influence (or KOLs, KOFs or KOIs for short) requires a different approach and set of skills. This is when investigative skills or a little bit of “detective work”, as we like to call it at Intelligent Insights, come in handy. When recruiting senior managers and experts (e.g. in B2B research or healthcare research), you require knowledge of at least 2 of the following 4 key pieces of information: Type of organisation Job title Role and responsibilities Seniority in role The challenge here is knowing what to do when this information is missing. How do you recruit respondents without a specific job title? This is a tricky one. More often than not, when our clients require experts or people with influence for their B2B market research, they use terms such as “C suites”, “advisers”, “leaders”, “commentators”, “influencers”, “proxy”, “policymakers”, etc. We’ve never come across universal directories, databases or paid lists of such individuals. So a little bit more information from the client will go a long way. You need a clear definition of the respondent’s role If you do not have a target job title to recruit with, you need to have a clear description of the role that the respondent must fulfil. Use the right professional platforms Social media platforms are not only for consumer recruitment or recreational purposes. Social media aimed at professionals should be the first port of call to try and find suitable candidates. Linkedin is the obvious choice for many with “ 830 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide ”. For country-specific or language-specific platforms, Xing is a good alternative to Linkedin for identifying participants in German-speaking countries. For France-based participants, Viadeo is a useful resource although it’s let down by many profiles not being up to date and members not being as engaged and responsive as Linkedin members. How do you recruit market research participants based on past experience v. present experience? In some circumstances it is advisable to recruit people who are not currently occupying certain positions, to avoid any conflicts of interest or suggestions of bribery. This is more challenging recruitment because most people tend to highlight current positions and achievements rather than past experience. Put on your detective hat and start looking for clues It’s time to channel your inner Sherlock Holmes and show off your detective skills. Professional social networks, which we have mentioned before, are particularly useful here. This approach does have its limits, though. It requires a lot of time, pouring over professional profiles as well as taking out a premium membership to access more features. It’s worth mentioning that these platforms usually limit the number of professionals that can be contacted, even with a premium membership. Fill in the gaps with additional online searches After all this “investigating”, it may still be necessary to trawl the Internet to find additional information such as contact details. Thorough online research is indispensable to fill in any gaps in the profiles with information found on company websites, articles, press releases, etc. This approach is extremely slow compared to more traditional B2B recruitment or typical B2C recruitment, and, as a result, requires much longer timelines and also results in increased recruitment fees. 2. How do you recruit patients with rare diseases? If you are recruiting patients you will need to take into account: - Type of disease - Any treatment undergone or to be undergone - Any medical device used or to be used This type of recruitment is a lengthy and difficult process and requires a combination of techniques. Get support from patient support groups The first port of call for recruiting patients should be patient support groups or advocacy groups. Some patient support groups are happy to help share information about market research studies if they feel that their members would benefit from taking part. Patient support groups are usually offered a financial reward for their help (typically in the form of a charity donation). Please bear in mind that it may take a while before the first group members start responding to the invitation to take part in the study. Start advertising Advertising online and offline is also a good option but it requires a bigger budget and longer setup time and time in the field.

INTELLIGENT iNSiGHTS, a full-service market research company, has appointed with immediate effect veteran market researcher, Mrs Cécile King, as their business development manager. Mrs King joins INTELLIGENT iNSiGHTS, an accredited Company Partner of the UK’s Market Research Society, fresh from a three-year stint as an associate director at a London-based market research agency, where she increased the top-line growth by about half a million pounds in both 2020 and 2021.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had lasting effects on all sectors of the economy worldwide. With Europe being the leader of international travel with over 700 million visitors annually, it was to be expected that the most popular holiday destinations would bear the brunt of the impact of the outbreak of Covid-19 on that industry. This short article details the importance of the tourism industry to the Spanish economy, highlighting some of the effects of Covid-19.