TrueSample Quality Council Establishes Industry-Wide Guidelines for Online Market Research Quality

NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- The TrueSample Quality Council, comprised of research buyers from Fortune 50 companies and leading research suppliers, announced today a set of online research quality guidelines that the Council is encouraging all research buyers to adopt and enforce. These quality standards, established by the TrueSample Quality Council member companies, including Research Now, General Mills, MarketTools, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Western Wats, highlight the group's commitment to improving the quality of online market research.

"Having consistent quality standards that all research buyers can adopt will improve research quality industry-wide," said Gayle Fuguitt, Vice President of Consumer Insights at General Mills. "We proactively initiated a continuous improvement approach back in 2007, improving our data quality over time through iterative experimentation and validation.  By adding quality standards to our RFPs for future partnerships and engagements, we are highly confident that we connect with the right consumers, who are engaged and unduplicated, leading to better insights."

"The TrueSample Quality Council has taken a giant leap forward toward the development of an industry-standard for online research quality," said Maria Cristina Gomez, Director of Corporate Consumer & Market Knowledge Foundational Scaled Solutions at The Procter & Gamble Company. "The guidelines the TrueSample Quality Council is issuing today will be immediately useful to research buyers to define quality, and to research vendors to deliver it."

The quality of online research has been a concern of the market research community for years, and independent research from major industry associations including the ARF and CASRO has validated that the quality of online research remains a problem.  The TrueSample Quality Council was formed in 2008 to advance gains in sample and research quality.  

Building upon work already done by TrueSample Quality Council member companies Microsoft and Procter & Gamble that was presented at the Forrester Marketing Forum in May of 2010, the Council members worked collectively to establish quality guidelines that are easily implemented in the research buying process to ensure a consistent approach to research quality. These guidelines are formulated as an easy-to-use checklist that research buyers can elect to insert into RFPs and SOWs so they can be confident that their online research will adhere to consistent quality standards.  The quality guidelines can also be customized to meet the specific needs of research buyers.

"Standard online market research quality guidelines are critical to achieving consistent quality across all online research," said Bob Fawson, Vice President of Online Services at Western Wats. "The standard guidelines will help research buyers easily identify suppliers who can deliver reliable data, and also prove that they have done so."

The complete list of guidelines for online consumer market research quality developed by the TrueSample Quality Council can be found at the following link: Online Consumer Research Quality Guidelines.

About the TrueSample Quality Council
The TrueSample Quality Council was established in 2008 with the goal of achieving objective and quantifiable gains in sample and research quality. The Council was formed under the premise that the only way to create transparency, consistency and reliability within the market research industry is for buyers and suppliers of market research to work collaboratively in addressing the issues that affect quality. The Council brings together leaders in the market research industry to share best practices in data quality and to help drive data quality initiatives across the industry.

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SOURCE TrueSample Quality Council