Panels
Panels are appropriate for both B2B and consumer research and are used for two main research applications :-
- Where respondents experience a product or service over a period of time and feedback is gained at regular intervals on their developing opinions of that product or service (this is often used at the pilot stage of a new product development cycle). Examples are vast and include - blue collar experience of pagers, corporate opinions of a new ASP service or SME office managers returning toner labels (as part of a counterfeit survey).
- Where a panel is maintained as a reference group and different topics are surveyed with that group. Again there are numerous examples and a typical application is a mobile phone user group who received a postal questionnaire every second week and attended focus groups each month.