ABSTRACT
An increasing number of advertisers track their competitors' activities as well as their own with continuous customer surveys. These are not once a year or once a quarter surveys. They are conducted every week—on small samples each week which accumulate over the year into a large database and provide a total, continuous picture. Market research is traditionally characterized by the large scale, large sample survey representing a single point in time. Known as 'ad hoc' surveys, these were sometimes conducted before an ad campaign and then again after it. Any differences in key measures between these two surveys were supposed to indicate possible effects of the advertising. Conducting ad hoc surveys or pre/post surveys was the 'old' way of trying to understand what is happening in a market. It is like taking a couple of still frames from the beginning and end of a TV commercial and trying to get a sense of whole commercial from just those two pictures.
