Dipsticks Research: Media innovators

Aug 21 2009 By Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

JEREMY Paxman called Fiona and John Raglan’s rural-based company “Emmerdale with laptops”.

They loved the description, but liked it even better when it was broadcast to an audience of one million on Newsnight (with another one million hits a month on the BBC website).

Dipsticks Research has since moved from its original Allendale base high up on the North Pennines to the relative bustle of Hexham in Northumberland, but there’s still a feeling of solidarity among its staff – the knowledge that they are producing results for London-based national and international companies from a former mill (complete with stream babbling below).

Dipsticks Research is a full-service market research agency specialising in media and marketing communications research. The company works with the biggest media brands in the UK, using cutting-edge technology and advanced research techniques – some of which have been developed in-house.

“It was a big decision to move from Quarry House at Allendale,” says managing director Fiona Raglan. “It was a fantastic location. We have a really buoyant young team as that’s the type of customer we work with. The diversity of brands is huge and we’re really well known in London but not so well known here – all the media research budgets are down there.”

Dipsticks carries out all the traditional research disciplines – street interviewing, web, postal, XDA (a hand-held device with a touch-sensitive screen), telephone, fieldwork, hall tests (hiring a venue in a central location and inviting a large number of respondents to evaluate your products or services), GPS tracking, focus groups, and in mobile phone research. It even operates in neuroscience where it works with Newcastle University and Professor Malcolm Young, one of only 18 scientists in the world nominated by The Sunday Times as “the brains behind the 21st Century”.

“Most of our business is out of the London media world,” says Fiona. “Our biggest client is the BBC Trust, some of it on sensitive issues. At the moment we're doing consultations with Radio 2 and Radio 6 and that will get published eventually. It’s quite nice that a North East-based company tendered for it and got it.”

Not entirely forgetting its “Emmerdale” roots, Dipsticks is also researching broadband connectivity in Northumberland and has a contract with Northumberland County Council on how the business community is coping with the current economic situation.

“We’ve just done a cancer-awareness study in Durham and Darlington,” says Fiona. “The name Dipsticks is great for the media environment in London but it doesn’t sit comfortably with, say, the NHS. Our public sector brand is Public Knowledge which works predominantly in the North East. It’s a different set of researchers and different reporting which tend to be word reports rather than in the media world which is Power-Point and a bit more jazzy.”

One area of research that has seen massive recent change is the huge growth in internet-based business. But Dipsticks is geared up for the way the sector is heading.

Fiona says: “We’re the only ones in the North East developing our own online panel – we have nearly 100,000 panellists, people from all over the country. I head a body called Survey Police and we’ve been number one on that since January this year which is great.

“We’ve been working with the Central Office of Information on knife crime in the UK, putting a questionnaire together for 13 to 18-year-olds about that culture. On the other hand, we might be doing something with KFC and with Thomas Cook about their new in-store currency offer.

“We’re very innovative, it’s what we’re known for and what people want in the approach to their results. We’ve even put GPS in London taxis on behalf of a client to monitor where they go for their business – it’s a phenomenal piece of research.

“Our engagement meter is another tool we have where you can gauge what parts of a radio or television advert engage people most – a 30-second snap of media consumption. We used it for the BBC on Gardeners’ World when Monty Don left the series. They had six other presenters who could have been his replacement, so we showed clips of them to a sample of 1,000 people. And, we created the tool right here in Northumberland.

“We’ve been working with the engagement meter with the Radio Advertising Bureau on a two-year analysis of different radio adverts. We’re rolling it out into South Africa – and Turkey is really interested.

“We’ve got great people here, 24 full-time staff and (stretches arms wide) that many researchers. I fact, we have 700-plus P60s coming through here at the end of the tax year. It’s all very positive, it’s still growth strategy and we’re finding the right people to train and develop with us.”