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  Field Research:
How it Works
Why we are the world’s premiere hotel reader board service
In September 2004 the Knowland Group launched its reader board service with two clients in a single U.S. market. Five years later we service over 100 markets in six countries for almost 2,000 clients. And unlike our competitors, Knowland markets are entire cities, not just quadrants. That means if you live in a U.S. city with 250,000 people or more, chances are Knowland is already there. Sure, we’re in places like New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. But we’re also in Anchorage, Alaska, Raleigh North Carolina, and Omaha, Nebraska. And we’re working to establish the same prevalence in Europe and across the globe. Now that we have become the first nationwide, coast-to-coast U.S. reader board service, we want to become the first worldwide one as well.
Bringing in-depth customized field research directly to clients…the very next day!
Each week we send out approximately 200 field researchers to take digital photos of hotel reader boards. Knowland field researchers travel thousands of miles in hundreds of cities and into more than 4,000 hotels. Since our founding, we’ve covered enough miles to travel to the moon and back – twice! Managing the world’s largest field research team in the reader board business isn’t always easy. But we have it down to an art.
Every night field researchers upload the photos they took and the data is recorded into the Readers database. This data is then made available online for all of our clients…the very next morning. Hotel sales teams can quickly and easily access all the details for events held at the comp set hotels they have chosen. Our field research management team monitors each and every photo taken for quality assurance. We have developed an intricate system of checks and balances to ensure that we instantly know if any inaccurate or outdated information is being used so that it can be corrected immediately. That way our clients can have absolute confidence in all the data we provide.
Field research is augmented by exhaustive internet and phone verification
We are constantly adding new groups to our database and verifying information on the hundreds of thousands of organizations already there. Our internet research team goes through every event description we collect to link the group that put on the event with that group’s profile in our database. If the organization does not already exist, we conduct research to create a detailed profile in our database including the group’s location, size, industry segment, and contact information. We also call every group listed on every reader board to ask who the meeting planner is for that organization. This crucial contact information, which we include in every group’s profile, can truly mean the difference between bringing new group business to your hotel and leaving them to your competitors.
At Knowland, we go the extra steps to find the actionable information you need.
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