Marketing the 1987 economic censuses

Abstract

The economic censuses are mail surveys of business establishments in the United States, conducted once every five years. They cover seven sectors of the economy: retail trade, wholesale trade, services, transportation, manufacturing, mining and construction. These censuses present two marketing challenges: promoting the timely completion of census forms by companies during data collection, and delivering the results of the censuses to researchers and decision-makers.

Census forms were mailed to 3.9 million businesses in December 1987 with a due date of the following February 15. While response is required by law, only about half of all businesses responded by the due date, and a series of follow-up letters were necessary to obtain responses from most of the remainder.

To promote timely response, the Census Bureau included explanatory brochures with each questionnaire mailed, asked hundreds of business publications to write articles about the censuses, and conducted a multi-media public service advertising campaign under the auspices of the non-profit Advertising Council. We conducted an attitude and response behavior study during data collection, and the results have yielded a number of ideas on how we should change our approach to respondents in the 1992 Economic Censuses.

Most of the 1987 census results have now been published in a series of over 500 printed reports, 20 computer tapes, and seven compact laser discs (CD-ROMs). We have promoted their dissemination and sale not as a source of income – since the law puts all census publications in the public domain and allows us to recover only the cost of reproduction – but as a way to increase the value the nation receives from its investment in this data collection. Marketing efforts have included product redesign, simplified product ordering, publicity in user-oriented periodicals, publication of guides and brochures, and holding a nationwide series of user conferences. In the long run, our most important activities may well be our efforts to effectively package our published data on CD-ROM for use on microcomputers, and our work to establish a network of intermediaries – librarians and state data centers – that can provide census information to researchers, government, the general public, and especially the businesses from which we obtained the census information in the first place.