The FIFA World Cup is (without doubt) the largest sporting event worldwide. The fact that it’s only done once every four years makes it even more exciting. As in most of Europe, Latin Americans are crazy about the sport.

The day the cup was over we launched a (rather large) survey where we interviewed around 9,000 people in 10 different (World Cup participating) countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Spain and Portugal.

First thing we wanted to find out was if people bought a new TV for the world cup. The results were quite consistent across Latin America (averaging 20%) but rather different from Spain and Portugal, were only 9% and 4% respectively told us they bought a new TV.

We can find a few explanations for this:

• Spain and Portugal played in the European cup in 2008 and people may have already bought new TVs then.
• Also, LCD TVs are already mainstream in Europe.
• People in Europe watch football matches in public spaces much more than in Latin America where matches are watched in private houses.
• The economic crisis in Spain and Portugal is still ongoing.

We were also interested in what type of TV people bought, although the overwhelming majority bought LCDs, we found that in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay more than 10% bought traditional CRT TVs.

And what about High Definition (HD)? These are the percentages of interviewed people that subscribed to a new cable or satellite service in order to watch the cup in HD:

We also asked if they watched at least one match in HD, results are quite similar across the board:

The World Cup is traditionally leveraged by brands and advertisers to push their products. Every beer, soft drink, sport drink, shoe, mobile phone and TV maker seems to get really patriotic around this time (no matter what country they are from). We asked people how they felt about this, although the results in Latin America were similar across the board (with most people finding the ads amusing/entertaining), Spanish and Portuguese don’t find this as funny…

Finally, one of the biggest controversies of this World Cup. Should FIFA introduce technology to assist referees in difficult decisions? Well, an overwhelming majority says. Especially in Brazil, Mexico and Portugal where well over 80% of people said yes. Argentines are actually the least enthusiastic about this (which is not a surprise given how much referee errors, I mean “divine” intervention, has helped us over the years):

What do you think? What is your take on these results? We would love to hear from you.

This article, published on the may issue of “Research World” magazine was written by one of Livra’s co-founders.

Too often Latin America ends up in the wrong Top 10 lists. Brazil is the most expensive place in the world to buy an iPod, Argentina shares the same transparency index spot as Libya and Burkina Faso and Colombia ranks fourth worldwide in the number of child combatants.

But once in a while we stand out in some of the good rankings. One area where the region has done spectacularly well in the last few years is the internet and in particular, social media.

According to the latest data from Nielsen Online, over 30% of the population in Latin America is now web active. This accounts for over 170 million people and in countries like Chile, Colombia and Argentina, internet penetration is now close to 50%.

Furthermore, Latin America, followed by Eastern Europe, is the fastest growing region in terms of broadband adoption. Broadband grew at a compound annual rate of 48% from 2003 to 2008 and continues to expand.

Savvy users

Unlike USA or Europe, most Latin Americans only discovered the internet in the last few years, and haven’t had to go through the pains of slow dial up, unfriendly browsers and search engines. The only internet they know is the fluid world of social media - and they love it. Brazilians for example are the top online social net-workers worldwide, with more than 85% active users according to Comscore.

One interesting difference is that some leading sites such as Fotolog and Orkut have only succeeded locally. Another difference is that users here aren’t used to dealing with laborious online surveys and are far more sophisticated and savvy surfers than the average user in the US and Europe at the time when online research exploded there. Users here were born in the era of social media and the web they know is social and engaging, with mass collaboration and co-creation at its core.

It is estimated that less than 1% of research is done online in the Latin American region so the potential for growth is enormous, hence the recent arrival of some of the large online panel companies.

Some tips

So, if you have the cojones to start doing online in Latin America (at Livra we’ve been doing it for over eight years), we can give you a few suggestions:

• Don’t treat Latin American users as Internet infants. We are digital grown ups, in fact users in some countries are more advanced than in the US and Europe.
• If terrible long surveys work badly elsewhere, they will have an even worse effect in Latin America. Brazil has one of the highest numbers of Twitter users in the world, think 140 characters and not 140 questions!
• People love expressing their opinion in Latin America; they do it through Facebook, Blogs, Twitter. They will be happy to complete surveys if the experience is consistent with the internet they know.
• Don’t forget Latin America is very diverse. The culture in Brazil is completely different from Mexico, Argentina or Chile. So a “one size fits all approach” may not work.

If we all keep these guidelines in mind, we may be able to have something unheard of -internet users loving online surveys!

By Diego Meller, CEO of Livra.com

The full magazine can be downloaded from here

Still haven’t heard enough about social media? Don’t worry, we’ll tell you all about it (and more!) in the upcoming ESOMAR Latin America conference.

The conference, which is happening in Cartagena (Colombia) between May 23 and May 25 is entitled “The Innovation Journey” and will focus on the Latin American market research industry. The programme offers a wide array of topics and very interesting speakers, these are some of the web-related presentations:

The Internet Connection Factor
How Latin Americans stay close to peers and companies
Roxana Strohmenger, Forrester Research, US

Decoding the digital needs
Lilian Matias & Ana Patricia Sequeira, TNS Research International, Brazil

Webnography a new market survey technique
Space turning into virtual territory
Manuel Barberena, Pearson, Mexico
Maria Elena León, Factory Ideas, Mexico

“Me to We” Research: digital characters
A new way of looking at ourselves
John Kearon, BrainJuicer, UK

And of course…

Social media and market research in Latin America
Enemies or best friends?
Diego Meller, Livra, UK

A few people from our team will be there so please come and talk to us!

We really hope you can make it!

You can register for the conference here:

ESOMAR Latin America 2010 Registration

(Early bird pricing available until April 20, so hurry up!)

Last week, on the 2nd and 3rd of November Buenos Aires was host to the 3rd SAIMO (Argentine Society of Marketing and Opinion Researchers) Congress, with the title “Research for Decision Making“.

This time, given that Buenos Aires is our home city, we decided that Livra Panels should participate a bit more actively. We were determined to make the congress a success, so we submitted a paper to present (it got selected!) and we became one of the main sponsors of the event. In that order

Our (awesome looking) stand, was a great way to interact with the crowd and get approached by the Argentine research community. It was great to be able to explain face to face what the benefits of online research are and how we can help them. The adoption of online research in Argentina (and most of the region) is still very low, in some cases below 1% of data collection is done online.

The Livra Team at the SAIMO stand

Our presentation, given by Diego Meller talked about The Impact of Web 2.0 on Market Research.  It focused mainly on explaining the transformation between the original web experience and what has become known as Web 2.0 and how this phenomenon affects the way we communicate and express our opinions every day.

The presentation was also supported by original data gathered in a study Livra did about social networks and web 2.0 in Latin America, 3,000 people in 6 different countries of the region were interviewed. We’ll publish some of these results later this week.

Thanks to everybody that came to visit to the stand and to SAIMO for organising and giving us the chance to present.

Our team will be attending the ESOMAR Online Research Conference in Chicago next week so if you are around please look us up! We’ll be happy to tell you more about what Livra can do for you. We can also organise private meetings during our stay in Chicago. If you are interested, just contact us.

Looking forward to see you there!

In case you missed it…

Last week, Livra Panels was one of the main sponsors in Mexico’s most important market research congress. AMAI’s “Reinventando AMAI” congress, focussed on new market research technologies and innovation.

Judging by the topics presented, the sponsors and the conversations we had with clients and other companies we can see an encouraging improvement in the adoption of online data collection in Mexico.

We want to thank everybody who visited our (great looking!) stand and congratulate Ernesto Roa, from Pearson for winning our iPod Touch sweepstake!

Laura Guerrero from Livra

Limited Edition Livra Mousepads!

Fiorella and Laura from Livra choosing the lucky iPod touch winner!

The user generated content explosion

It has been already a few years since the social networking phenomenon started developing on the Internet, even before that (through the rise of blogs) we saw very early signs of a trend that is now clear and unstoppable. Given the right tools, people will express themselves. They post their thoughts on blogs (like this one), their photos on Flickr, their videos on YouTube and pretty much everything else on Facebook (although Facebook is mostly a closed network, which means your content is only seen by your friends).

The most interesting aspect of all these networks is that most of them started as a “sandbox” or a set of tools that would allow their users to explore different ways of broadcasting content. The very nature of user generated content is that users make of it whatever they want.

Your life in 140 characters

When Twitter appeared it was difficult to understand why we would need yet another tool to broadcast our content, but its signature twist was what made all the difference: On Twitter you can say all you want as long as you limit your updates to 140 characters at a time. Originally, the idea was to provide a medium through which we could keep up with what friends where doing but it soon developed into much more. Here is a short video that Twitter uses to describe its service.

The other key to Twitter’s success was the fact that anyone could (and still can) develop a Twitter client (a piece of software from which you could read other people’s updates or update your own status) which means that now there are dozens of different ways to keep up with it (through the Twitter site, desktop apps like Tweetie, Twitterrific or TweetDeck, through iPhone apps, Blackberry apps or even through SMS and instant messaging).

Suddenly, a bunch of people started not only sharing their mundane activities but also links to interesting articles or blog posts as well as having “public” conversations about different topics (in Twitter one can post a public reply to another user).

The revolution will not be televised, but twittered?

Fast forward to today and Twitter has become a massive communication and information tool for millions of people, some studies estimate 12 million people will be Twitter users by the end of 2009. Famous technology personalities (like Kevin Rose, Tim O’Reilly, Leo Laporte, Pete Cashmore), celebrities (like Britney Spears, Oprah, Jimmy Fallon) and politicians (like Barack Obama, Al Gore, John McCain) have helped Twitter achieve its current status by making it one of the main ways that their followers or fans can keep up with them.

All major news outlets (from The New York Times to Al Jazeera) now use Twitter as an additional channel to broadcast their news.

Moreover, Twitter’s importance has been highlighted recently as it was an instrumental tool to get the word out in recent conflicts such as the Iranian elections where the press was heavily censored.

Twitter and Brands

Predictably, the corporate world discovered Twitter. The same way celebrities can use it to keep up with their fans, brands can use it to keep a direct line of communications with their customers.

Companies like Southwest Airlines, Zappos and Dell have managed to build a robust base of followers but Twitter’s most important use for brands and companies should be the ability to listen what people are saying about them and their competitors. Simply by searching on Twitter’s search you can find out if someone has been praising or cursing your brand, and even directly reply to your customer. CRM software suites like SalesForce.com are already incorporating “Twitter modules” in order to do just that.

Twitter and Research

The impact that Twitter is having on the research industry is limited but (as with any social network) the potential is very interesting.

Millions of people are voicing out their thoughts, opinions, rants and ideas publicly with Twitter without asking anything in exchange. Moreover, people are asking, discussing, arguing and collaborating on Twitter on thousands of different topics.

The challenge for the research industry will be about how to cleverly leverage all this information and blend it with other sources to produce valuable insights for our clients without biasing or arising suspicion or lack of confidence in the users.

For the first time in history anybody with access to a computer and an Internet connection can broadcast their thoughts to the world for an insignificant marginal cost, whether we ask about for it or not.

It’s up to us to use this wisely.

You can follow Livra Panels on Twitter here.

According to a report released by Cisco, broadband connections in Argentina have increased an amazing 35% during 2008.

The finding comes from the 7th edition of the Cisco Broadband Barometer, which is issued every 6 months by Cisco and IDC.

Mobile Broadband also registered strong growth of 50.4 % during the second half of 2008, demonstrating that this type of access is becoming popular in Argentina.

The penetration of broadband connections per 100 inhabitants reached 8.8 percent in December 2008, compared to 7.8 percent from the previous Barometer edition; positioning the country in the first place of Latin America in broadband penetration with Chile. Uruguay is in the second place with 7.6 percent. Even though the growth was significant, compare to Korea with 31 percent there is a big gap between developed countries and emerging ones.

The report revealed a few other interesting findings:

• • In the analysis by market segment, home connectivity representing 94 percent of the fixed connection total, while businesses account for 6 percent.
• • The distribution of mobile connections per market segment reveals the dominance of “residential” over “business” connectivity. The former accounts for 76 percent of connections, while the latter accounts for 24 percent.
• • As for the distribution per region, the province of Buenos Aires represents 55 percent of all mobile connections and 45 percent in the rest of the country.
• • The distribution of fixed connections per download speed grew in the ‘1 Mbps to 1.99 Mbps’ category. It went from 45 percent of the total connections in June 2008 to 47.3 percent in December of the same year, due to new offers by the service providers.

This is the distribution of people who access the Internet via Broadband (this includes home and work) from the Livra’s Panel:

People that access the Internet via Broadband in Livra’s Online Panel

Source: Livra Panels Incidence File May 09

More info  on the Cisco report here:

Broadband Connections Increase 35 Percent in Argentina During 2008 [PR Domain]

The research industry has a very good answer to those that question its validity in these times of crisis. When times are bad you need to make better, faster and more informed decisions. That is where market research comes in, especially online research which allows you to get faster results.

Nevertheless, big consumer marketers are seeking to shave 10 to 20% off of research budgets and the industry is being put to test.

John Quelch from HarvardBusiness.org says:

“In flush times, a rising tide of consumption can compensate for less than optimal branding, positioning, pricing, or segmentation. That is certainly not the case now. At the same time that marketers must pare down research expenditures, they face added pressure to secure high-quality data and insights”

He gives seven steps or recommendations to minimize the impact of the crisis, here is a summary of these:

• Stay focused. Savvy marketers focus their research on the products, brands, and markets that are key to their marketing strategy. In a recession, it’s essential to get a clear read on existing core customers, including those who are most loyal to the brand and those who are most profitable, rather than fritter away research resources on potential or peripheral consumers.
• Enlist trusted partners. Marketers and research suppliers who trust each other and have established long-term relationships can jointly plan how to extract more insights and make better decisions based on fewer expenditures. For example, combining data sets may reveal new leading indicators of changes in consumer behaviour. Tracking studies may have an edge over one-off projects.
• Value experience and judgement. Research buyers should tap the knowledge and intuitions of managers and researchers who’ve lived through previous recessions. In setting prices, for example, such insight can help calibrate the optimal level of price promotion offers. Experience also reveals proxies: in tough times, some marketers use research results from Sweden as a proxy for Scandinavia, rather than conducting the same research in all Scandinavian countries.
• Seize opportunities overseas. Some large multinational marketers, such as Unilever, are shifting research expenditures away from Western Europe and toward emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. Relative to the developed economies, the costs of research in emerging economies are less and the payoff from incremental insight can often be greater. Brand preferences and consumption levels in emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil tend to be more fluid. Consumer research is therefore critical to aid marketers trying to cement brand preferences early on as these economies develop.
• Go online with a dash of skepticism. Online research is cheap, fast, and the wave of the future. There are plenty of tools that allow non-expert users to create custom surveys in minutes. As an alternative to offline focus groups, custom online panels of consumers can be formed for qualitative research on new product ideas or new ads. Taking the do-it-yourself approach rather than outsourcing to a market research firm is attractive in a cost-cutting era, but you risk getting no more than what you pay for. The opinions of convenience sample of an enthusiastic online brand community may not represent all users.

• Don’t cut across the board. Just as important as knowing where to cut research is knowing where not to cut. When marketers are creating fewer new ads and introducing fewer new products, it is doubly important to use rigorous pretesting to select the strongest alternatives. In categories where the bases for consumers’ value judgements are changing, modest expenditures on copy research can prevent blowing much more money on ineffective messaging. Adding a few questions to standard tracking studies is a low-cost way to shed light on changes in customer attitudes and purchase behaviour. For key products, running conjoint studies to check on shifts in price elasticities of demand and price-attribute tradeoffs can usefully improve the profitability of pricing decisions at a time when cash is king.

• Keep an eye on the new consumer. No one has a perfect record of predicting the future, and the recession is making it harder for consumers to envision or articulate their needs. Even so, and despite budget pressures, smart marketers devote a portion of their market research to getting a handle on future changes in consumer behavior. Are consumers of your brand going to revert to previous consumption patterns when the recession ends? Or are they developing coping mechanisms that will endure, especially if the recession is lengthy? What new products and services will consumers be open to embracing? If, as in the financial services category, consumer confidence and trust in brands have been seriously eroded, how long and what steps will it take to regain them? Eventually, the recession will end, and future success depends on being well-positioned, based on sound research, when it does.

This post was based on the following article by John Quelch:

How to Use Market Research in a Recession [HarvardBusiness.Org]