MARS Consumer Health Study is Transitioning Online, Yielding Tremendous Benefits to Clients

by Jayne Krahn

Evolving consumer trends are shaping the future of healthcare. Similarly, healthcare marketing is adopting a more targeted, patient-centric model. Simply put, agencies and advertisers need more data for marketing and planning.

In order to continue collecting the data that clients need, Kantar Media’s MARS Consumer Health study is transitioning to an online survey instrument with an offline component designed to measure ailments, media consumption and demographics across the entire U.S. adult population. An online survey instrument will provide additional ailment and media statistics that could not be collected in a paper questionnaire.

Key Benefits:

• Survey questions narrowly tailored to targets
• Lower incidence ailments can be targeted within a panel
• Follow-up questions exclusively designed for an ailment, which produce condition-specific deep dives
• Total media brand exposure based on a six-month screen
• Expanded information sources, including use of mobile devices for health management
• More details on the condition caregiver and their role
• Attitudinals organized by topic related to advertising, doctor-relationship, prevention, diet & exercise, pharmaceuticals, OTC and others
• Opportunity to target Hispanic respondents with a bilingual survey
• Re-contact or omnibus studies among particular ailments or other targets can easily be executed in a timely and cost-effective way for segmentation and other data needs

The new methodology will be implemented with the fielding of the MARS 2015 Study. Online fielding will start in October 2014, while the offline sizing study will field in January 2015. The full 2015 study will be released to clients at the end of April 2015.

Since 2001, Kantar Media’s MARS Consumer Health has produced a wealth of data affording knowledge and guidance to ad agencies, pharmaceutical marketers and media. These studies have always and will continue to rely on our partnership with sponsoring advertising agencies and their pharmaceutical/healthcare clients for the necessary content collected through our surveys.

For more information about Kantar Media’s MARS Consumer Health, call Michele Deutschman at or