Making student marketing budgets accountable

Guest article by Ben Marks, Opinionpanel. First published in the book Targeting Students: A Marketing Guide (2005).

Ben Marks set up Opinionpanel in January 2004 in association with Professor Martin Collins, former Chair of the Market Research Society and leading writer on research techniques. Ben has over fifteen years of marketing and market research experience and an MBA from City University. Opinionpanel Research runs The Student Panel comprised of 22,000 students in UK higher education.

Here he explains why he set up Opinionpanel, the first online research panel dedicated to the student market, and how it could help deal with one of the key issues in student marketing: accountability...

Student marketing budgets have, for too long, been unaccountable due to a lack of access to quantitative research. Over the last year, The Student Panel has made quantitative research among students affordable.

For many in student marketing, market research simply means thinking back to being at university. For the more analytical and those prepared to accept that times change (and rarely has there been more change in higher education than over the past decade or so) market research often means the focus group. These have reached almost mythical status; politicians - and marketers - announce no changes unless their plans have been shown to 'research well' in groups.

But while focus groups are ideal in certain circumstances, they simply cannot answer many of the important questions. If you need to determine your market size and share accurately, measure the effectiveness of your campaign and compare it to the national norm, segment your market, benchmark against competitors, run opinion polls, test customer satisfaction or measure brand awareness, you really have no alternative to quantitative research. Yet in the student niche, quantitative market research methods usually get overlooked.

For example, as we reach a tipping point in the PC market, it is quantitative research that is best suited to provide time-sensitive, market share data. We researched a representative sample of 1031 students and found that today, more own laptops (38%) than desktop PCs (37%), and an astonishing 22% of students own both a laptop and desktop PC. With the rapid proliferation of wireless hotspots on campuses and in halls, it seems mobile computing is finally coming of age amongst students, and marketers need to know these kinds of 'hard facts' as they happen, not a year later, and not through an anecdotal sense that laptops are becoming popular.

The reason quantitative methods have been neglected: there simply hasn't been much available on students. While the general UK consumer market has plenty of independent sources for tracking and market measurement, they have all tended to let students slip under their radar. Long holidays, variable work hours, frequent home moves and a lack of fixed line phone contacts have conspired against representative samples appearing in (supposedly) UK representative research. In terms of research tailored specifically for students, very little has been developed, either for ad hoc or continuous work. Research firms have traditionally baulked at making big investments in what they see as niche market (despite the spectacular growth in recent years). Finally, samples of students that are specially recruited tend to be either of poor quality (just a few sampling points on each campus at a small number of universities) or time-consuming and extremely expensive. The result: students have become a research blind spot.

This has been bad news for student marketing. It has led to a proliferation of 'best guess' marketing strategies based on the unsubstantiated claims of media owners. It has meant substantial marketing investment in the student market that has not been made accountable - which has led to some spectacular failures over the years. It has meant marketing has been heavy on implementation and light on analysis, planning and control. Not a very fertile business environment; and where angels fear to tread…

Most of the bespoke student market research services, in the past, have been provided by media owners and marketers with big student subscriber lists. They have tended to fail due to a lack of independence, lack of expertise, unrepresentative lists and importantly, subscribers who got fed up with providing free research for companies they were contracted to for other purposes.

Opinionpanel is different because we are specialists, independent and fully accredited. We have the only fully representative online sample, with over 22,000 students covering almost every one of the 170 higher education institutions in the UK, and large enough to provide robust coverage for almost every sub-group: sex, ethnicity, type of course, individual institutions, etc. They are all pre-recruited through agreement with UCAS (the UK's central body for handling university applications) and word of mouth.

Face-to-face recruitment on campuses fills quota gaps, making the panel nationally representative. Each panellist has actively submitted a detailed joining questionnaire, is rewarded by Amazon vouchers, and receives regular feedback bulletins. Our panel members are never approached for sales or marketing purposes. Rigorous security procedures mean there are no multiple identities and every panellist is a 'real' higher education student.

There are two ways to use the panel. Our Student Omnibus Survey reaches a representative sample of 1,000 students once a fortnight. Clients can place as many questions as they like. Recent questions into student drinking habits found a diverse picture. Once upon a time student drinking patterns were straightforward: beer (and lots of it) at the students' union. Today most students start drinking at home before a night out. And while the students' union is still popular, it's no longer the automatic choice, with local pubs and style bars playing an important part of nights out. Our other main service, The Student Access Panel, allows researchers to reach any profile of students at any time. Fieldwork normally takes three days and response rates are typically above 60%; 'clicking through' is minimal and open ended questions yield rich detail.

So let's consider how it works. How, for example, can you determine your market size and market share? A questionnaire that addresses issues of spend, usership and brand preference allows market size and market share to be logically inferred. At Opinionpanel we set quotas for year group, university type and gender, made nationally representative using data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency [HESA]. And we can easily set quotas for many other discriminators such as course, degree, social grade, region, ethnicity, etc. Because our samples are representative, we can multiply up to obtain market size and share. So we offer a unique capacity.

In terms of tracking student opinion, The Student Panel has evidenced a dramatic change in student political views, highlighting just how volatile and dynamic this market can be. The Student Panel carries out continuous research into student voting intentions, and has built up research over the past year. Heading into the 2005 general election, we've noted a fall-off in support for the Liberal Democrats from 40% to 31% of the student vote, with a concomitant rise in the Labour vote from 20% to 28% between August 2004 and February 2005. Voting intentions are just one of many metrics that can be tracked.

When it comes to products, we can collect data on purchase locations, frequency and brand preference as the basis for a full marketing plan emerges.

We can help unravel some of the contradictory rules of student marketing. For example, some say that freshers week is the best time to market to students as so many of them are receptive to marketing messages and on the point of making important decisions that they will stick to for some time. Many others say freshers is too busy; unless you have a big budget behind your campaign you will not cut through the noise.

We researched when students choose to switch mobile phones (contract and/or handset) and found that campaigns taking advantage of the freshers' fairs chose an important switching occasion. Despite widespread criticism of these events as being too crowded for brands to get heard, 9 per cent of students overall changed phones during this short period; even higher - 14 per cent - for first year students. Research can help you identify the key moments in the year around which to base your marketing schedule.

Then there's the delicate matter of getting your tone right. Many brands fall into the trap of patronising students with hackneyed creative - booze, bonking and baked beans. Research can help get the message right. This is often best achieved using qualitative techniques - depth interviews, focus groups and ethnographic methods can be really powerful in this pursuit. The Student Panel comes into its own when testing alternative creative approaches.

The message is that it is worth doing your research. For too long student marketing budgets have been largely unaccountable. My three key recommendations to those interested in understanding students are:

1 Don't spend significant amounts of money based on hunches and guesses, or what you remember of student life from your time at university. The market moves fast;

2 Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research to understand what motivates students and what will make them engage with your brand;

3 Make sure you evaluate. This is the key to making your marketing budget accountable. Quantitative research methods will be central to achieving accurate measurement.

I believe that those that do their research in the student market will see a year-on-year return on investment grow.