Ceremonial opening of our institute on April 11, 2008

Our institute that had already been working for a couple of days was formally opened on Friday, April 11, 2008 with numerous visitors present.
Here you find photographs of the opening ceremony.
Nomination of Info GmbH for
Preis der Deutschen Marktforschung 2008
and
Großer Preis des Mittelstandes 2008

In times of increasingly differentiating markets target groups of new products have an extremely low incidence within total population and thus cannot be reached easily or, least of all, described representatively.
With the help of our innovative research method developed for the market launch of the Apple iPhone as a combination of CATI and online surveys it is possible to link offline and online surveys directly. Thus, not only a qualified numerical estimate of potential buyers but also their representative description within the framework of quantitative surveys can be implemented. Simultaneously, this method allows a reliable projection of buyers’ share in total population due to its experimental layout.
Both survey methods separately would not have been capable of getting these results. The CATI survey would have forecasted more than one million possible iPhone buyers and the screening effort to describe realistic buyers’ potentials is not legitimated by the generated expenses. An online survey, as well, would have led to clearly inflated target group numbers due to limited representativeness without the parallel CATI reconciliation (initial incidence for the actual survey: online 5%, CATI 2%).
The new ProTo method not only succeeded in determining the scale of very small target groups but also in obtaining a sufficient number of samples in a representative way for the description of milieus and for structuring. After quite a long time the „experience milieus“ according to Gerhard Schulze could be again operationalized and verified in the population and potential iPhone buyers could be allocated representatively to the milieus by using special segmentation. These were excellent prerequisites for a specific promotional approach to the target groups.
A realistic number of iPhone buyers could be exactly determined and extrapolated by the methodically new, experimental “Buy it now” option within the framework of online surveys. A very small buyers’ share has been predicted and the real sales figures are effectively within the range of the confidence interval of the forecast. As far as we know, a comparable accuracy has not been reached so far by similar studies. Since the iPhone project was very important for T-Mobile Deutschland as far as profitability and corporate policy are concerned this study had a big share in gaining insights and economic success for the company. The newly developed method can be used in a lot of similar cases within the scope of product development and marketing. Thus, we provide a quantitative instrument not only to determine but also to map structurally even very small target groups.