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• List of Surveys

Social Research

GfK Social Research focuses on people and organizations. Across markets, at the individual and the institutional level, we provide a more in-depth understanding how lifestyles, consumer habits or working life structures interact.

The researches that do not focus on a specific marketing problem or a specific market but deal with general issues that are relevant to the solution of several markets and different types of marketing problems constitute a separate branch of market research. These researches strive to explore consumers’ basic characteristics in general.

The three most often surveyed topics are the following: 

Consumer Confidence Indexes and Prosperity Barometers 

On the other hand, when consumers’ expectations are pessimistic, they expect their income to stagnate (or rise slower than the inflation rate), that results in cutbacks in consumption, increased savings and the stagnation or decline of the economy after all. This is the connection on the basis of which the different indexes surveying the population’s mood have been developed, which, as experience shows, can extremely accurately forecast economic growth.

Value Surveys, Lifestyle Typologies

Segmentation based on demographics is useless in the case of a lot of markets; as a result, it is necessary to examine the factors that basically influence consumer behaviour (values, motivations, objectives, views of life) and prepare the segmentation on the basis of them. Such a typology is able to reliably forecast who are the consumers that will be the first to try a new brand or product, and who are the ones that stick to the tried and tested old ones, who are the ones that look for pleasure in the consumed quantity, and who are the ones who rather prefer quality, who are the consumers that can be addressed through advertisements placed in newspapers, and who are the ones that can only be reached through television etc.

Trend Research

Changes in the society do not leave consumer habits unchanged either (for example, environment protection as a factor influencing shopping was of secondary importance even in Western Europe 20-25 years ago, however, is one of the most important criteria now, but the aging of Western societies is an equally important trend, the fact that a half of the society will be over 50 in 20 years). Consumer trend researches try to follow these changes: the researches typically conducted annually or biannually aim to survey the trends that can be seen in consumers’ way of thinking, find out what the underlying reasons are and how consumers’ expectations change as a result, what new market opportunities open up.