In a recent article on conducting international marketing research in the 21st century
(Craig and Douglas 2001) the application of new (electronic) technology for data
collection was encouraged. Email and web-based data collection methods are attractive
to researchers particularly in international marketing, because of low costs and fast
response rates. Yet the conventional wisdom is that, as some people still do not have
access to email and the Internet, such data collection techniques may often result in a
sample of respondents that is not representative of the population in question. In this
article we evaluate multimode strategies of data collection that include web-based, email
and postal methods, as a means for the international marketing researcher to obtain
survey data from a representative sample. An example is given of a multimode strategy
applied to the collection of survey data from a sample of respondents across 100
countries
