Company profile
1．What experience does your company have in providing online samples for market research?
VALUES is a marketing consulting company with the largest online behavior log of consumers in Japan. We have supported more than 300 companies, including the Japanese government. Also, we have been accumulating our own data for more than 10 years. We provide SaaS tool “Dockpit” which enables you to monitor competitors’ promotion strategies online. We also conduct customized research and consultation for our clients to support their marketing strategy development in Japan.
Sample sources and recruitment
2．Please describe and explain the type(s) of online sample sources you get respondents from. Are these databases? Actively managed research panels? Direct marketing lists? Social networks? Web intercept (also known as river) samples?
We recruit our quantitative survey monitors from general consumers through advertisements and affiliates. Unbiased panel is formed because we recruit monitors not relying on particular membership organizations or point scheme.
We collect internet behavior log data hourly in the units of URL, not relying on Cookie, with the official permission from monitors. We proud ourselves by our comprehensive analysis covering the details of external behaviors, by crossing consciousness data collected by questionnaires with the detailed internet behavior log data that may not be usually able to remain in their memories.
3．If you provide samples from more than one source: How are the different sample sources blended together to ensure validity? How can this be replicated over time to provide reliability? How do you deal with the possibility of duplication of respondents across sources?
We don’t blend multiple data as we basically conduct our analysis with single data sources.
4．Are your sample source(s) used solely for market research? If not, what other purposes are they used for?
We don’t deliver direct mails to promote sales as we use our sample sources only for market research.
5．How do you source groups that may be hard to reach on the internet?
We don’t proactively recruit panel members who don’t access the internet considering our company’s competitive advantage as in-depth analysis on internet users.
6．If, on a particular project, you need to supplement your sample(s) with sample(s) from other providers, how do you select those partners? Is it your policy to notify a client in advance when using a third-party provider?
We mainly select partners so that we are able to obtain attributes which made few appearances in our company’s panel. Past experiences show that we have successfully supplemented our samples as we could reduce accidents in operation and burden in terms of cost, by focusing on existing partners who have worked with us multiple times.
We started using partners after notifying our clients and attaining their permission in advance.
Sample sources and recruitment
7．What steps do you take to achieve a representative sample of the target population?
We are able to narrow down streaming and set up retrieving in advance by using genders, ages, and residential areas.
Therefore, it is possible to retrieve in the way that they get closer to the composition ratio of genders and ages in the internet population even when SCR research is retrieved.
8．Do you employ a survey router?
No, we don’t employ any survey routers.
9．If you use a router: Please describe the allocation process within your router. How do you decide which surveys might be considered for a respondent? On what priority basis are respondents allocated to surveys?
Inapplicable
10．If you use a router: what measures do you take to guard against or mitigate any bias arising from employing a router? How do you measure and report any bias?
Inapplicable
11．If you use a router: Who in your company sets the parameters of the router? Is it a dedicated team or individual project managers?
Inapplicable
12．What profiling data is held on respondents? How is this done? How does this differ across sample sources? How is data kept up-to-date? If no relevant profiling data is held, how are low-incidence projects dealt with?
We obtain the following information first by a questionnaire survey upon monitor registeration.
Responding to our questionnaire survey is the compulsory requirement for the participation in all our upcoming research. We are able to control streaming by using them as we have all the information of our respondents.
Gender, age, prefecture of residence, occupation, industry marital status, number of children, family structure, gender of the oldest and youngest, academic background, type of residence, number of owned automobiles family annual income, individual annual income.
Monitors are asked to update their information at least once a year.
We also have other regular questionnaire surveys for our monitors so as to attain more necessary details.
13．Please describe your survey invitation process. What is the proposition that people are offered for taking part in individual surveys? What information about the project itself is given in the process? Apart from direct invitations to specific surveys (or to a router), what other means of invitation to surveys are respondents exposed to? You should note that not all invitations to participate take the form of e-mails.
Monitors respond to questions through an application they have installed. They can decide whether to participate in the process based on their consideration after reviewing the “title of questionnaire, “number of questions”, “estimated time required”, “number of points given”, “matters that require attention (question on health condition etc.)”.
14．Please describe the incentives that respondents are offered for taking part in your surveys. How does this differ by sample source, by interview length, by respondent characteristics?
Respondents are granted with certain points for their participation in our survey.
The number of points differs according to the type of questionnaire, the number of questions, required time, etc. The number of points changes according to the effort paid by the monitors.
All respondents are rewarded with the same number of point regardless of their groups. They can choose their rewards from approx. 6,000 types of E- money, miles, points offered by various external agents, etc.
15．What information about a project do you need in order to give an accurate estimate of feasibility using your own resources?
We are able to estimate the number of potential respondents precisely based on our previous experiences as organized in our exclusive database. When we encounter difficulties providing an accurate estimation, we calculate a “feasible number” by conducting a simple survey as a preparatory research in advance. We need the concrete requirements of the target groups along with the schedule of the survey for a precise estimation.
16．Do you measure respondent satisfaction? Is this information made available to clients?
We estimate the respondent satisfaction level by checking continuation rate of our monitors. We are constantly improving our service by grasping the dissatisfaction of respondent- we make sure they do not have hesitation to ask questions. We are also thinking about measuring the satisfaction rate in the future.
17．What information do you provide to debrief your client after the project has finished?
We notify our client when we start conducting our survey and when we have updates during the survey. We also have regular communication with our clients to minimize influences on the schedule. We report the final number of collected samples upon completion. We also provide details about the survey period and collected samples in the final report.
Data quality and validation
18．Who is responsible for data quality checks? If it is you, do you have in place procedures to reduce or eliminate undesired in-survey behaviours, such as (a) random responding, (b) Illogical or inconsistent responding, (c) overuse of non-response item (e.g. “Don’t Know”) or (d) speeding (too rapid survey completion)? Please describe these procedures.
We assign our associates as persons in charge, and they are responsible for checking the survey details and data quality.
The person in charge is obliged to check FA answers by visual inspection. He/ She will make deletion if there were meaningless descriptions such as answers with only alphanumeric characters. He/ She also delete inconsistent answers and answers with inadequate information only with the same number to all the questions are found.
At present they are not excluded from the monitor members. However, we are planning to amend the rules on quality check in the near future.
19．How often can the same individual be contacted to take part in a survey within a specified period whether they respond to the contact or not? How does this vary across your sample sources?
The same individual can be contacted to take part in a survey as there are no specific rules. We encourage our monitors to participate regularly and continue to register for the panel by delivering questionnaires to all panel members at least 8 times a month so as to ensure our monitors have sufficient participating opportunities. We also do streaming excluding monitors who has previously taken part in certain surveys upon request.
20．How often can the same individual take part in a survey within a specified period? How does this vary across your sample sources? How do you manage this within categories and/or time periods?
We don’t have specific rules and limitations.
20．How often can the same individual take part in a survey within a specified period? How does this vary across your sample sources? How do you manage this within categories and/or time periods?
We don’t have specific rules and limitations.
21．Do you maintain individual-level data such as recent participation history, date of entry, source, etc. on your survey respondents? Are you able to supply your client with a project analysis of such individual-level data?
We maintain individual-level data such as current participation history.
Yet, we don’t supply our clients with such individual-level data.
22．Do you have a confirmation of respondent identity procedure? Do you have procedures to detect fraudulent respondents? Please describe these procedures as they are implemented at sample source registration and/or at the point of entry to a survey or router. If you offer B2B samples what are the procedures there, if any?
We prevent duplicated registrations by phone authentication during the registration process. We believe that individuals commonly do not have multiple phone numbers, very different from email addresses that people can easily register more than one.
Policies and compliance
23．Please describe the ‘opt-in for market research’ processes for all your online sample sources.
We adopt the opt-in style.
Step1) Enter the phone number on the registration page.
Step2)Enter the authentication code to be sent out separately , yje registration process is then completed.
Registered members are able to cancel a their membership in the application site.
24．Please provide a link to your Privacy Policy. How is your Privacy Policy provided to your respondents?
Below please find our Private Policy. (In Japanese only, our apologies.)
https://u-voice.net/privacy.html
25．Please describe the measures you take to ensure data protection and data security.
We obtained ISMS to ensure data security by complying with the ISMS policy.
26．What practices do you follow to decide whether online research should be used to present commercially sensitive client data or materials to survey respondents?
We have a full set of regulations for our monitors so they are not allowed to share the information they obtained in our surverys like posting any contents on social media. We also make a clear statement on the first page of the online questionnaire.
27．Are you certified according to any specific quality system? If so, which one(s)?
We are not certified at the moment.
28．Do you conduct online surveys with children and young people? If so, do you adhere to the standards that ESOMAR provides? What other rules or standards, for example COPPA in the United States, do you comply with?
We don’t conduct online surveys with children. As for young people, we are able to do so in compliance with the standards of ESOMAR and Japan’s JMRA.