A blog about CATI surveys? Why not!

Your house is your larger body. It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless.

Kahlil Gibran

Welcome!

Today we’re launching our new digital house. I’m excited, we’re excited. It’s so weird, writing on this blog, being able to connect with you and embrace you, even if you’re miles away. It is so exciting being able to greet you in our place and involve you in our project that, besides regarding our company and our digital platform, is made out of passion, dreams, expertise and relationships.

I couldn’t imagine all that, or at least I couldn’t understand its potential. Until Giorgio Fresta and Enrico Flaccovio, our new IFF digital team members, told me about how writing on a blog could give the possibility of sharing our emotions, experiences and knowledge.

A blog is a house that we build with the stories that we write every day in our lives.

What are the stories made of? Conversations, interactions, relationships, secrets, advice.

This is what we aim to do: tell you our stories and create a very solid community of relationships.

My encounter with the market research industry occurred more than ten years ago, at first I started as a caller, then I became a manager. I learned that market researches are conversations, they’re like small rooms, that become bigger with the relationships we develop.

IFF International is a great adventure. It’s engaging and amazing, and Jens Overlender, Federica Curcurù, Tom Abele, the forerunner of all this, and all of us want to keep living this adventure enhancing it with inspiration, colors, imagination and expertise.

What’s new with our company?

1. A new official website

I lost count of the times we’ve changed our website over the last years. We’ve had the iff-international.com domain since 2009. It is now a very innovative one-page website, we added the News area and we’ve improved it on every aspect. Go visit it. We’re still perfecting it though, we’re going to add new pictures and areas.

2. New offices for the IFF International Italy HQ

We’re still at the same place, but we broke down all the walls – well, not us directly – to create an open space. We wanted to create a bright and comfortable environment to let our professional team easily and quickly interact with each other. Basically, we’re constantly briefing. So I’m really happy with it.

3. Social networks and blog

We finally opened a Facebook page as well as Twitter and Instagram accounts. They’re fun and useful to keep in touch with you, to show you IFF human resources and, obviously, to increase our brand exposure with sponsored posts. But our blog is our main platform, and our social medias are going to join here.

How did we organize our CATI survey blog?

The market research industry is huge and it involves a lot of different target groups. Our direct clients are the market research institutes, such as Nielsen, GFK, TNS, Ipsos, just to mention the most famous ones. But we’re aiming to reach:

• the clients of our clients, who may be curious or doubtful and want to understand more about it;
• the web marketers, who are only aware of online surveys and don’t know anything about offline surveys;
• the companies who courageously chose to improvise an internal field to interview their customers;
• the students who need inspiration and distinguished sources;

We mainly conduct CATI surveys, but that doesn’t mean we’re not interested in what’s happening around us. We’re going to tell you about our market research experiments, I hope we‘ll get to do a lot of them. We’re going to post our feedbacks about all the different events we’re attending to as presenters, lecturers or just visitors. We’re going to impartially analyze all the new technologies developing through the Internet. We spontaneously decided to divide our blog into the following four areas.

Method

It’s our backstage, where you get to know the tricks of the trade, and it’s dedicated to who wants to know more about CATI surveys.

Experiment

Where you can find the market researches we’re going to conduct aside from our timetable.

Overview

Where you can find an overview on what’s happening in the whole market research industry.

Event

Where you can find our feedbacks on the market research events we’re going to actively attend to.

Ok, I guess I got a little too excited and I think I should probably stop myself from writing more and more. I’m going to learn how to be a perfect blogger, I promise! So, my dear #CATIlovers, enjoy your reading and welcome, again.

If you have any kind of question or suggestion, please contact me at: e.armato@iff-international.com

Ennio Armato (Branch Manager, Italy)