Using wireless monitoring for market research interviewers.

Nasui, Dorel Vasile ; Cosoi, Alexandru Catalin ; Sgarciu, Valentin 等

1. INTRODUCTION

The task of marketing research is to provide management with relevant, accurate, reliable, valid and current information. Competitive marketing environment and the ever-increasing costs attributed to poor decision making require that marketing research provide sound information. Sound decisions are not based on gut feeling, intuition, or even pure judgment.

Marketing managers make numerous strategic and tactical decisions in the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs. They make decisions about potential opportunities, target market selection, market segmentation, planning and implementing marketing programs, marketing performance, and control. These decisions are complicated by interactions between the controllable marketing variables of product, pricing, promotion, and distribution. Further complications are added by uncontrollable environmental factors such as general economic conditions, technology, public policies and laws, political environment, competition, and social and cultural changes. Another factor in this mix is the complexity of consumers. Marketing research helps the marketing manager link the marketing variables with the environment and the consumers. It helps remove some of the uncertainty by providing relevant information about the marketing variables, environment, and consumers. In the absence of relevant information, consumers' response to marketing programs cannot be predicted reliably or accurately. Ongoing marketing research programs provide information on controllable and non-controllable factors and consumers; this information enhances the effectiveness of decisions made by marketing managers.

Traditionally, marketing researchers were responsible for providing the relevant information and marketing decisions were made by the managers. However, the roles are changing and marketing researchers are becoming more involved in decision making, whereas marketing managers are becoming more involved with research.

Further on, the authors present the main characteristics of market research:

First, marketing research is systematic. Thus systematic planning is required at all the stages of the marketing research process. The procedures followed at each stage are methodologically sound, well documented, and, as much as possible, planned in advance. Marketing research uses the scientific method in that data are collected and analyzed to test prior notions or hypotheses.

Marketing research is objective. It attempts to provide accurate information that reflects a true state of affairs. It should be conducted impartially. While research is always influenced by the researcher's research philosophy, it should be free from the personal or political biases of the researcher or the management. Research, which is motivated by personal or political gain, involves a breach of professional standards. Such research is deliberately biased so as to result in predetermined findings. The motto of every researcher should be, "Find it and tell it like it is." The objective nature of marketing research underscores the importance of ethical considerations, which are discussed later in the chapter.

Marketing research involves the identification, collection, analysis, and dissemination of information. Each phase of this process is important. We identify or define the marketing research problem or opportunity and then determine what information is needed to investigate it, and inferences are drawn. Finally, the findings, implications and recommendations are provided in a format that allows the information to be used for management decision making and to be acted upon directly. It should be emphasized that marketing research is conducted to assist management in decision making and is not: a means or an end in itself.

In most cases, market research starts with collecting data. The information can be collected from stores, clients, random people on the street, companies and so on. Usually this happens with the help of interviewers, which have to follow strict routes and interview as many people in a day as possible. Also, the clients who ordered the market research would appreciate a transparency of the interview process and see the process in real-time, since some believe that part of the studies are forged by the interviewers in order to complete their tasks faster.

A system that would provide the transparency of the process, track in real-time the routes of the interviewers, measure the time spent in each location (interview duration estimation) and even helping the user to find different locations is needed.

2. PROPOSED METHOD

The wireless monitoring system can control and monitor the mobile assets from a computer through a software application called SafeDispatch that is a part of the SafeMobile's Asset Management System line of business products. SafeDispatch can monitor the fleet more efficiently and can reduce losses from pilferage and unauthorized use. With SafeDispatch the user can obtain information about the vehicles at anytime, information about performed routes vs, planned routes, driver tracking information. The tool can also check the speed of the vehicles and monitor different routes that the drivers perform.

SafeMobile Asset Management System consists of three main components: the Remote Unit, the Communication Platform and the Application Software (SafeNet/SafeDispatch). Remote Units are available for transmission over a variety of wireless network. The Remote Unit used for monitoring the bus school is using GPRS communication network.

The Vehicular Unit contains a microcontroller embedded in a Delight modem and a GPS module. The communication platform is via GSM/GPRS communication network. The operating system is firmware.

The communication platform is via GPRS communication network. GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) is a private network for data. It uses the existing GSM network to transmit and receive TCP/IP based data to and from GPRS mobile devices. Private IP addresses are dynamically assigned within the network to the mobile devices.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The communication protocol is represented by the following stages:

1. The GPS module sends data to the microcontroller that is embedded in the modem

2. The microcontroller sends these data through communication module (via GPRS) to a Gateway (the Gateway is a software application that is hosted on a computer with a public IP address)

3. Before sending data to the Gateway, the microcontroller packs these data

4. The Gateway unpacks the data and loads them in data bases The final user can monitor the vehicles with SafeDispatch/SafeNet software applications.

SafeDispatch is SafeMobile's client hosted application; it provides a rich graphical user interface to the dispatch and automatically plots vehicle positions using Microsoft MapPoint.

The major features for SafeDispatch are:

* creating tabs to track interviewers, and monitoring different routes that the interviewer performs

* information about routes performed vs. routes planned

* agent tracking information

* saving events for future reference and analysis

* SafeDispatch allows tracking units through different tracking tabs; live tab displays real-time information about the mobile assets, history tab shows history information on selected units.

SafeDispatch allows setting up different landmarks on the map. Landmarks are points on the map, or particular geographic locations that can be marked by placing special icons on the map allowing to identify when a unit is near a particular location.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

3. CONCLUSIONS

The configuration presented in this paper is used in several countries for bus-school monitoring: Skokie School District--Illinois --Web-based AVL System with Professional Units; U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity--Puerto Rico --Web-based AVL System with Professional Units; DHL Romania --Web-based AVL System with Basic Units; Cyprus Police--Cyprus--Client-hosted AVL system with Professional Radio Units***, and has proved that it works and can be considered as a fast and reliable system.

Using the same configuration adjusted for market research interviewers brings new advantages in the market research industry: trust, speed and reliability.

Clients are able to see what each interviewer is doing at a certain moment and that all desired routes are followed as planned. Interview designers are able to see how long their interviews last in real life.

In case an agent gets lost, the company is able to help him with directions since they know the exact position where he is.

4. REFERENCES

Huang, G. (2006). "Control the vehicle flow via GPS monitor center", Proceedings of the 6th WSEAS International Conference on Signal Processing, Computational Geometry & Artificial Vision, World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS), ISBN: 1790-5117, ISSN: 960-8457-51-3, Elounda, Greece, 2006, pp 174-181

Xinhua, H, Wenliang X. & Guang Z. (2003). "Electronics map control for vehicle monitor", Intelligent Transportation Systems, Proceedings IEEE, volume 2, 2003, 12-15 Oct. 2003, pp 924-926

Zhao F., & Guibas L., "Wireless Sensor Networks--An Information Processing Approach", The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Netwoking, Series Editor, David Clark, M.I.T.

*** www.safemobile.com

*** www.airradio.com

*** http://home.mira.net/~gnb/gps/nmea.html#gprmc

*** Expert Choice has the solution to help. http://www.expertchoice.com/xres/uploads/resource-center documents/Market_Research.pdf

*** Market Research Council http://www.forrester.com/role_based/pdfs/msecouncil_feb0 9.pdf

*** IpsosInsight http://www. ipsosinsight. com/