Continental Research

About the company
Continental Research is a full service market research company. It began trading in 1989 and is a member of the Arbitron group of companies.

We offer the full range of research services: quantitative and qualitative, ad hoc and continuous, consumer and business, and domestic and international. The company is IQCS (Interviewer Quality Control Scheme) approved.

Continental Research offers market research solutions to all kinds of marketing problems, but has specific expertise in the following sectors: advertising and brands, finance, media, public sector and telecoms.

Full service research
At our offices in London we operate our own 100-line telephone unit equipped with CATI facilities. The company’s face-to-face division has a UK field force of over 950 IQCS-trained interviewers. We have full in-house dataprocessing and coding facilities. In-house statistical capabilities provide market modelling facilities.

Survey facilitation/analysis
We look to do more than just replicate traditional offline questionnaires online. We use Visual Online Questionnaire technology – which makes much greater use of a respondent’s sight, and allows them to interact with the questionnaire – to obtain qualitativetype insight from quantitative-sized samples.

Other services
Another qualitative tool is our SurfCam. This enables us to evaluate any website by simultaneously recording a user’s surfing, mouse/cursor movement, and verbal and facial reactions to what they are doing online. This is excellent for demonstrating consumer reactions to websites.

Distinctive features
Continental specialises in ad hoc research and we look to avoid trying to address a client’s research needs by just imposing a standard solution/product. We aim to provide actionable results and added insight rather than just data.

Track record
Continental first conducted online research in 1997. Since then we have completed several studies comparing the results of offline and online research. We are therefore aware of the biases (for example, the generally favourable attitude of online respondents towards new technology) of online research, and how these can be overcome.

Coverage
Through Continental Knots Online, we have a very large panel in all the major European, Asian, North and Latin American countries. Within the UK we also have an SME business panel of senior decision makers.

Type of contact
For consumer panellists, we hold information not only on standard demographics, but also occupational and educational information, media consumption and purchasing behaviour. For SMEs we hold detailed business demographics.

Major research activities/formats supported
Panels are recruited from a wide variety of offline and online resources, the objective being to avoid potential bias by relying on one single source.

Panellists are provided with incentives for participating in research (even if not eligible for interview), leading to increased loyalty. Quality control is vital, and particular importance is attached to making sure respondents have no idea who we are looking for and what answers are needed to be eligible for the study.

In most major European and Asian countries panel sizes are (often well) in excess of 100,000, allowing niche groups to be researched cost effectively.

Special techniques/branded offerings

• Online panel of SME businesses in the UK, recruited off the back of our regular (telephone) Small Business Omnibus, enabling us to reach a business audience quickly and cost efficiently.
• We have published two Convergence Reports which look into how a range of different services, such as TV, internet, radio and telecoms services, are now available via different platforms including broadband internet access, mobile phone and digital TV.
• run ad hoc, tracker or media measurement online surveys.

Training and technical support
We have run workshops on statistical techniques in the following areas.

• Key driver analysis – used to determine the most important predictors that affect individual or group thinking or action. It allows us to see which is the most important factor driving interest in a product.
• Segmentation analysis divides a survey population into distinct clusters. Using this method we can identify customer groups that had not been considered previously, or devise precision communications to speak to a certain group.
• Trade-off analysis can be used to deduce the relative importance of a range of product attributes.