Reflection on the Past -- Looking to the Future

My first encounter with consumer research was in early 1952 while working with Procter & Gamble, establishing quality control limits for color and perfume of bar soaps and detergents. In those days, most of the limits were established on the basis of judgment by the in-house experts. It was my supervisor's thought that the consumer's input should be considered. My problem was that in those days consumer research was generally carried out through door-to-door research, a very costly and time consuming method.

It was the idea of my two supervisors, Mr. Chuck Krause and Mr. Frank Iskra, to set up a method by which we had consumers readily available for face-to-face research with a fast and inexpensive method. It was their idea to set up a CLT operation where we went to the consumers rather than having them come to us and that we would have their services for an extended period of time so that they could participate in a number of projects. We not only had the participants doing sensory tests on site, but we also gave them products to take home for evaluation and to come back two weeks later for the follow-up interviews. It should also be pointed out that this type of research is more suited to exploratory research.

Our first year, we conducted research with 2,400 homemakers consisting of 7,200, one-hour visits. This resource quickly became popular among the R&D community where they were able to evaluate prototypes of new ideas before going forward to the very costly market research test designs. It should also be pointed out that this type of research is more suited to exploratory research. I firmly believe that this resource was P&G's competitive advantage of the 1960's through the 1980's. It gave them the opportunity to evaluate many more ideas in a shorter period of time and at a greatly reduced cost. In our second year of business, we were utilizing 16,200 participants and 48,600 participant visits where each participant was involved in an average of 12 projects over the six weeks (approximately 700 projects per year).

In the past four years since I have retired and have done some work with about forty multinational companies, I have found that very few have the resources to invest in the above type of in-house operation Procter has set up. Through my encouragement, [actually I have been pushing it since 1990], Elrick & Lavidge is putting together a syndicated CLT to offer this type of research to their clients.

E&L, much like P&G, will start small and grow as the demand dictates. They plan to recruit panelists to attend the CLTs in specific cities on specific days well before they have tests scheduled. The clients will be notified that on a certain week of every month there will be 400 homemakers available for testing across four cities. Each client can buy into the survey depending on their current needs. The advantages of this type of research are too numerous to mention at this time.