Originally uploaded by Gregory Barbier.

To put camcorders in an house 24 hours a day for one week in order to watch what people are doing: a new reality TV show? No, you are wrong. It is actually a customer behaviour survey realised by Findus. The aim of this search is to analyse how the French families eat, where and when.

The marketing department of the company will be focused on TV during a whole week in the end of March 2005, analysing the different behaviours of ten volunteer French families from both Paris and Lyon. There will be three different cameras: one in the kitchen, one other in the living room and the last one monitoring the table.

This kind of action is more reliable in terms of findings. It is not actually the first study of this kind realised by Findus. Already in 2003 it organised a similar action. What the marketing department learned from the first one was completely different from the findings of a market survey with interviews and questionnaires. For instance they have observed in the first loft that 80% of people eating frozen food are used to look at the box of the product to see if it is possible to cook it in the microwave. On the other side most of the market studies have shown that French people used their microwave from times to times. Where is the flaw?

Findus thinks it is in the dogmatic quantitative studies. That is why they have chosen to launch a pre-cooked meal adapted to a cooking in microwave. This was ... a real success.

Is the frozen food used by choice or by necessity? What is the role played by children in the consumption of the family? What are the effects of TV on meals? The company prefers answering these questions by observation instead of questioning people. Especially when the cost of this action accounts for only 100 000 Euro.

Is this survey a revolution in Marketing? It may be or not. But one thing is sure: Findus has stopped all its traditional surveys to be concentrated on this one.