Profile: Harris Interactive Inc. (HPOL.O)

Harris Interactive Inc. (Harris Interactive) is a professional services firm. The Company provides market research and polling services, which include ad-hoc or customized qualitative and quantitative research, service bureau research (conducted for other market research firms) and long-term tracking studies. The products and services provided by the Company include custom research, tracking study research and service bureau research. The Company conducts a portion of its market research using online data collection. It also conducts computer-assisted telephone interviewing in telephone data collection centers in the United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore. Harris Interactive outsources telephone data collection and survey programming to contracted sources in a number of countries, including India and Costa Rica.

Custom Research

The Company conducts many types of custom research, including customer satisfaction surveys, market share studies, new product introduction studies, brand recognition studies, reputation studies, ad concept testing and more. A custom research project has three phases, which includes survey design, data collection, and weighting, analysis and reporting. The initial meetings are conducted with the client to clearly define the objectives and reasons for the study, which ensures that the final data collected meets the client’s needs. The field data collection is conducted through computer-aided online or telephone interviewing, by mail or in person, by holding focus group meetings, or any combination of the above. The Company reviews the collected data for sufficiency and completeness, weight the data accordingly and then analyze by desired demographic, business or industry characteristics.

Tracking Study Research

The Company provides expertise to the design, execution and maintenance of custom, online tracking studies for clients in a range of industries and worldwide. The tracking studies regularly ask identical questions to similar demographic groups within a constant interval to feed business decision-makers with dynamic data and intelligence that enables them to measure and sustain customer loyalty, gather market and customer intelligence relative to the brand and category, detect emerging market trends and/or potential threats, assess the impact of marketing on customer behaviors and attitudes, and identify opportunities for growth.

Service Bureau Research

The Harris Interactive Service Bureau (HISB) conducts data collection for other market research firms. The services are provided to the firms that do not have internal market research capabilities.

Harris Interactive competes with Synovate, Arbitron Inc., GfK AG, IMS Health, Inc., Intage Inc., Ipsos SA, National Research Corp., TNS and Millward Brown, and YouGov plc.