“Quality, quality, quality: never waver from it, even when you don’t see how you can afford to keep it up. When you compromise, you become a commodity, and then you die.”—Gary Hirshberg

The market research industry has struggled for years to recruit the right respondents and ensure the best research panel quality. It’s a well-documented problem, as evidenced by the small sampling of online articles below:

• Is Online Sample Quality a Pure Oxymoron?
• Combatting Questionable Quality of Online Data Collection
• Does Online Panel Quality S*ck?
• The Problem with Online Panels
• How Good are Online Survey Panels?
• Bogus Respondents, Bots and Bad Data: How to Work with Market Research Panel Providers to Avoid Potential Pitfalls

We’ve talked about issues like this on our blog before, but we figured it was time for a more in-depth exploration of the problem. So, we’re writing a multipart series where we’ll assess what it means to have a quality panel, how to make a great survey, and where panels and panel firms came from.

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