Harris-Interactive's description of their technology
(Visit the Harris-Interactive site for more information.)

Technology: The Harris Interactive advantage

Building on a legacy of integrity, reliability and accuracy dating back more than three decades to the founding of the renowned Harris Poll, Harris Interactive has established itself as the world leader in Internet-based market research.

Through the development of a proprietary suite of cutting-edge technologies and research methodologies, Harris Interactive conducts a wide range of research using the world's largest database of cooperative global respondents, now numbering more than 4.3 million and growing rapidly.

Today, Harris Interactive is in the unique position of being able to provide unparalleled global market research capabilities. Thanks to our state-of-the-art technological innovation and implementation, we can turn around surveys in record time, without sacrificing the quality for which our firm has long been known.

Harris Interactive: Cutting-edge technology leadership

Under the leadership of Leonard Bayer, Harris Interactive is well equipped to:

  • Gather an increasing number of participants and continue to build the largest database of cooperative respondents available anywhere
  • Deliver exceptionally personalized, rich-text e-mails to more than 250,000 individuals per hour in most national languages
  • Provide the world's most interactive surveys, in which each successive question is chosen based on a respondent's answers to preceding questions
  • Employ up to 18 survey engines, supporting as many as 12,000 survey respondents at one time
  • Receive and process up to 144,000 five-minute surveys in one hour
  • Provide analysis and sample balancing for each research mission
  • Handle many large research missions at one time without sacrificing quality or efficiency
The advantages of Internet-based research

Given the size of our database and the number of surveys Harris Interactive is able to deliver rapidly via the Internet, we are able to promise a superior research product in terms of data richness. Yet in another respect, Harris Interactive's online surveys are more akin to telephone surveys than other online research products because they are based on our Dynamic Survey Construction. Questions can become progressively more personalized, utilizing the concept of Successive Disclosure. Because questions are asked one at a time, answers to current questions are used to determine the content of follow-up questions. The resulting data can be as specific as you need it to be.

Our online methodology is unique in another respect. Respondents are invited via e-mail to take your survey at their convenience, rather than being asked to respond to a telephone survey at a time that may not be ideal. The e-mail invitation provides a date range in which to respond, making it easy for most respondents to fit a survey into their personal schedules. And, unlike telephone and mail surveys, Harris Interactive's online questionnaires can incorporate visual cues at any given point under the control of the survey process.

The benefits are clear. Our Internet-based surveys can be completed in as little as 48 hours, deliver diverse or specific geographic segments, and receive input from thousands of individuals at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time required for mail surveys, telephone surveys, or personal interviews.

Harris Interactive's patent pending technologies

As the leader in Internet-based research, Harris Interactive has patents pending for a number of proprietary global research technologies. Among these are:
  • ConceptLocSM -- A privacy patent that allows marketers to display visual stimuli via the Internet, from slogans and print ads to full TV commercials, which cannot be captured electronically by the survey respondent. Status: Patent pending.
  • A system designed for multi-lingual surveys to be conducted at one time in many different locations. This system actually recognizes the language of the respondent and provides the survey in the respondent's preferred language. The respondent can be allowed to compare his or her responses against those of others within that country, and also compare responses from that country versus prevailing global opinion. Status: Patent pending.