Virgin Galactic mailed me a survey which you can access. Answer truthfully. I (owner of SpaceShot) am not like the competitors that Julian Simon talks about in his mailorder books that tries to muck up competitors' surveys. They inquire about pricing for Virgin Galactic Quest in $10 increments from 0-60+. Drop me a line at transterrestrial@dinkin.com or comment what you think tournament entries for a trip to space should cost. Also tell me what kind of profit margin you think would be fair. And whether a bundle of more than one entry would be OK. Note that credit card fixed charges are $0.30 + 2-3% at paypal which has a restrictive skill games policy and $0.40 or more elsewhere so credit cards will eat up 6-7% of a $10 charge, but only 4-5% of a $20 charge. Can someone give me a quote for the cost of building and analyzing one of those surveys? (I don't want to buy one, just validate my decision not to.)

Hi Sam

I guess I'm qualified to answer that. I used to be Market Research Manager for one of Britain's largest gambling businesses, and was then did a fair bit of NPD research for a large lottery operator. Currenlty build predictive models based on MR.

Off the bat - traditional market research techniques are tricky when it comes to any form of gaming or wagering. This is particularly true of price sensitivty research. As the price changes the product (price and odds) also changes. Also as volumes change (more sales) then so to does the price and product! This very close coupling of price/prize/volumes make for a highly non-linear and inherently difficult to forecast market dynamic. Classical price sensitivity methods simply don't work. Wagering/gaming is also a potentially sensitive area for some people, not only from an outright rejectionist point of view, but also gambling is deeply deeply irrational and man is a rationalising animal. When asked what we do and why, we will rationalise our all ready existing prejudices. When asked to explain illogical behaviour in any form of market research instrument we suffer cognitive dissonance and without lying tell untruths.

The above does not mean that meaningful insights can't be generated by MR, but they can't be generated by run of the mill approaches. I'm guessing your mail out/mail in survey from Virgin was using registered interested parties as the sampling frame. If this survey was managed internally then the total cost will be the printing and postage, plus a bit of time for a secretary to bash the results into excel. Don't even get me started on why this approach may not be ideal, but in terms of bits of data per pound spend you can't beat it.

The next step up the ladder would be buying a couple of runs of questions on one of the big omnibus surveys. You can usually ask a nicely balanced random sample of 1000 a couple of closed yes/no questions, a run of likert scale (strongly agree to strongly disagree) questions, and an open write in question for a low thousands. You would get your results back as a nice set of cross tabs with all the usual demographics breaks (age/gender/region/education/ethnicity etc) For a few hundred more the supplier could run off cross tables to order (three way age by sex by region for example). A lot of the ommibuses also ask a standard bank of attitudinal questions as well so you can get breaks against questions like "how likely to take a risk you are".

The next step would be to use one of the specialist omnibuses - for example there are omnibus surveys that specifically sample the young/the rich/ the asian ... whatever.

Then you would be into some purchasing some one off survey work. Here you would be knees deep in crafting your own sampling frame; setting detailed research objectives; building predictive models and segmentations by attitude. You would certainly need your project managed and overseen by a professional. It's been a while since I did one of these but for a full-on usage and attitude survey with detailed modelling you would be looking at c50,000. The bulk of that cost would be for the time the various research specialists would have to spend on your project. I'm afraid stuff like that is not cheap.

These prices are all UK, but they can translate pretty simply to US. Internet vs mail vs phone isn't going to make a massive difference on price. Just pick the approach that suits you research objectives. Really really fancy stuff like full immersive research, anthropological approaches etc etc can cost into the millions.

Hope this helps