For Immediate Release: 12/10/2022. London, UK.
The research note investigates the impact of behavioural framing effects on market research panel conversion and engagement rates.
Aegon UK’s Centre for Behavioural Research have, in conjunction with the FlexMR research team, published a research note titled The Impact of Behavioural Framing Effects on Market Research Conversion Rates in the International Journal of Market Research.
Written by Dr Thomas Mathar and Tereza Anderson from Aegon UK, plus Christopher Martin, Charlotte Duff and Dr Katharine Johnson from FlexMR, the research note explores the impact of financial incentives, various framing effects, and combination messaging on the likelihood that potential research participants will sign up to take part in a market research panel.
To replicate the real-world challenges of insight professionals, the study followed an experimental design that sought to recruit existing Aegon customers to a new research panel. Recruitment emails were distributed to 90,000+ customers based on financial incentives alone, behavioural principles alone or financial incentives plus behavioural principles. Specifically, the principles of endowment, social proof, altruism and loss aversion were tested.
Dr Thomas Mathar, Insight Manager said, "Research professionals spend a lot of time on identifying and crafting the message that achieves high participation in surveys and panels. At Aegon UK, we apply an evidence-based approach in all our customer communication. We rigorously and systematically test the messages we’re sending to assess whether they achieve best outcomes for our 4 million customers.
At Aegon UK’s Centre for Behavioural Research we specifically test the impact of framing effects and choice architectures that have been proven to work in some contexts to establish whether they might also work in our initiatives. This joint study with FlexMR gives us great confidence to pursue one particular type of framing when encouraging participation in our customer panel. We hope that the findings will help other research professionals in their endeavour to achieve higher panel participation and survey response rates."
The study highlighed that tested framing effects performed on par with a financial incentive for stimulating panel signup or engagement. However, the addition of loss aversion performed on par with the incentive only group, plus led to a significantly lower unsubscribe rates. The authors highlighted this nuanced conclusion, surmising that the loss aversion tactic, when used as an additive to financial incentives, offers a positively balanced risk profile for research recruitment.
Charlotte Duff, Head of Insight at FlexMR, commented, “As the battle for consumer attention heats up, privacy concerns continue to grow and economic pressures mount, the market research industry is facing some real challenges. Chief among them is research engagement. As a sector, we rely on participants to engage with researchers to fuel the insight that we provide. But for many, that is stalling. By building on the existing body of academic literature, we hope that this research on research will provide guidance on how best to frame recruitment messages for greater success.”
The full text is available through the International Journal of Market Research OnlineFirst service today prior to its print publication.
About Aegon UK
As one of the world’s largest financial service organisations, Aegon UK works with advisers, employers and individuals to offer long-term savings, investments, pension solutions and protection products to over two million UK customers. Aegon UK is part of the wider Aegon Group, based in the Netherlands, whose roots go back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Since then, Aegon has grown into an international business, with over 31 million customers in multiple countries.
About FlexMR
FlexMR is the Insights Empowerment Company. As markets grow and consumers evolve, brands must fight to stay at the forefront of industry. To succeed in this competitive landscape, research teams need an insights partner they can rely on. A partner dedicated to their success. That’s what we do. We thrive on making insight more relevant, more accessible and more impactful - whilst overcoming the challenges that modern research, product and marketing teams face.
