Online surveys in marketing research: pros and cons

In a recent article on conducting international marketing research in the twenty-first century (Craig & Douglas 2001), the application of new (electronic) technology for data collection was encouraged. E-mail and web-based data collection methods are attractive to researchers in international marketing because of low costs and fast response rates. Yet the conventional wisdom is that, as some people still do not have access to e-mail and the Internet, such data collection techniques may often result in a sample of respondents that is not representative of the desired population. An article evaluates multimode strategies of data collection that include web-based, e-mail and postal methods as a means for the international marketing researcher to obtain survey data from a representative sample. An example is given of a multimode strategy applied to the collection of survey data from a sample of respondents across 100 countries.