Monday, April 14, 2008
4+ remotes per household
There are 66 million remote controls in The Netherlands. With 16 million inhabitants, that's about 4 remotes per country. This according to a pan-European study by TNS-NIPO for Philips among two-thousand people, on which Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant reports (in Dutch only). It turns out that 75% of all Dutch people own more than four remote controls. Almost a third of the households has more than six of these devices.
Gender differences
The results of the study also counters the commonly held belief that men are in charge of the remote. Especially in the Mediterranean countries it seems to be mostly women who take control. The further north you get, the less difference there seems to be in remote control-control inequality.
Is this useful information?
Though fascinating, studies like these always make me wonder: what do the results really tell you. Families own more than 6 remotes. Interesting. How many of them do they really use? And how often? And what annoys them most? And would they be willing to invest to get rid of four of six remotes? Now that would be a couple of interesting answers... However, the aim of the study might have been more in the realm of generating free publicity for a new remote control. Don't be surprised if we see a new Philips universal remote control soon...
4+ remotes per household
There are 66 million remote controls in The Netherlands. With 16 million inhabitants, that's about 4 remotes per country. This according to a pan-European study by TNS-NIPO for Philips among two-thousand people, on which Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant reports (in Dutch only). It turns out that 75% of all Dutch people own more than four remote controls. Almost a third of the households has more than six of these devices.
Gender differences
The results of the study also counters the commonly held belief that men are in charge of the remote. Especially in the Mediterranean countries it seems to be mostly women who take control. The further north you get, the less difference there seems to be in remote control-control inequality.
Is this useful information?
Though fascinating, studies like these always make me wonder: what do the results really tell you. Families own more than 6 remotes. Interesting. How many of them do they really use? And how often? And what annoys them most? And would they be willing to invest to get rid of four of six remotes? Now that would be a couple of interesting answers... However, the aim of the study might have been more in the realm of generating free publicity for a new remote control. Don't be surprised if we see a new Philips universal remote control soon...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 reactions:
Most certainly they got much more information from the research, but of course they won't tell everybody (including their competitors).
Well, if it was a purely survey-based research, I actually wonder whether they got any richer information than the kind that was in the article. But that's really hard to tell, because I can't find any information on how the survey was conducted, neither on the Philips website, nor on the TNS-NIPO website. It's hard to put research results into perspective, if you don't know how the research was conducted. Meanwhile, all the results of studies conducted by companies to generate publicity for a product ("the number one annoyance in toilets at work are unclean toilets", this research was brought to you by Unilever...) are really starting to annoy me. But I guess the conclusion is that the press should be more critical when publishing the results of these kind of studies.
Post a Comment