Sylvia Ashby

Sylvia Rose Ashby (1908 – 1978) was a British-born Australian market researcher and founder of the Ashby Research Service.

A pioneer in the field, she was the first female market researcher in Australia and the United Kingdom, and the first person to conduct an Australia-wide public opinion poll.

Mentored by two of the finest market researchers of the day, she used her experience to great effect and steadily grew her business.

During the Second World War her company experienced hardships due to a public that was suspicious of inquisitive representatives who would poll public sentiment about the war and the prime minister; in addition there was a reluctance among companies to spend money on market research, which they felt was unnecessary in a time of rationing.

Nevertheless, she came to the attention of Sir Keith Murdoch, who offered her the opportunity to set up Australia's first public-opinion research subsidiary.

When Sir Frank Packer made a counter-offer she accepted, and made Ashby Research Services a subsidiary of Australian Consolidated Press.

Ashby employed mainly women to survey housewives, who she considered to have great purchasing power, despite her view that most housewives were timid and shy creatures beholden to their husbands.

After the war she continued innovative research, establishing the Ashby Consumer Panel, in which households maintained regular diaries that enabled her to gather continuous market research data.

Toward the end of her life, Sir Frank Packer sold her back her company for the same price as he purchased it, before ailing health caused Ashby to sell her company to Beacon Research.

Ashby was born on 8 June 1908 at New Sawley in Derbyshire, England to married couple Bertha Ashby (Powell) and Walter Bertrand Ashby, who was a brickmaker.

She was their fourth child; her siblings included Bertha Joan Prior and William Bertrand Ashby.

The family migrated to Hawthorn in Melbourne when Ashby was five, and she was educated in Auburn, Hawthorn, and Camberwell state schools.

In 1923 Ashby started two years of training at a business college run by Frederick Zerko, after which she took up a secretarial job at J. Walter Thompson Australia Pty Ltd (colloquially known as JWT).

The company downsized considerably when it lost the General Motors account, due to the Great Depression, and Ashby was relocated to the Sydney office.

There she worked in the market research and psychology departments under Rudolph Simmat, and by 1933 was William McNair's assistant.

Both Simmat and McNair gave her valuable experience and mentoring in market research; Simmat had authored one of the first studies into Australian market research, and McNair later formed the McNair Survey, a company that undertook major television and radio audience ratings surveys.

In 1933 she resigned and moved to London, where she worked first for the London Press Exchange, and then for the Charles W. Hobson agency.

Though the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that "she spent much time reorganizing his library", Ashby found the contacts invaluable and the experience highly rewarding —particularly in that it taught her "to be always on the look-out for ideas for campaigns".

While in London she attended conferences and seminars in Europe and North America.

During this time she also worked with the German Ministry for Propaganda, conducting research into how to improve relations between Britain and Germany, though when it was leaked to the public, sentiment was such that she immediately withdrew from that program.

Ashby returned to Sydney in 1936 and started her own business, the Ashby Research Service.

Although she almost immediately secured a contract with an advertising agency to conduct a three-month-long survey of Melbourne's leading evening newspaper The Argus, it was nevertheless a difficult start.

She later recounted that her initial problems were partly caused by "business executives [who] appeared to know little and to care even less" about market research; this was compounded by prevailing societal views of women, which were not positive toward women who ran their own business.

Yet Ashby became a tireless promoter of market research in a market that did not yet see the value of such research, let alone paying for it.

In a profile for The Sydney Morning Herald she was described as "perhaps the only woman in Australia who has specialised in market research".

Ashby herself later declared that she was the only woman in the British Empire conducting an independent market research bureau.

She persevered against the challenges, and within five years her clients included the Australian Gas Light Company, Pick-me-up Condiment Co. Ltd, the National Bank of Australasia, Dunlop-Perdriau rubber goods, Bushells, the Australian Women's Weekly and a number of advertising agencies.

Ashby's method was to employ mainly women, who she believed were more conscientious and effective investigators than men.

In particular she found female investigators "much more patient with other women", and that "women will talk to another woman more freely".

She preferred unmarried women, as she believed that "a single woman is better able to concentrate solely upon the problem on hand [and] has no home worries to distract her [and] has more time to keep herself physically fit".

Ashby essentially believed that unmarried women had "a singleness of purpose denied to the married woman".

She found focused interviews directly with housewives the most effective approach to market research.

In a later interview with Australian Women's Weekly, she showed two small wooden, jointed mannequins as an example of how she expected her representatives to conduct themselves.

One mannequin showed "Mrs. Right" and the other "Mrs. Wrong".

Mrs. Right, she explained, "is erect, relaxed; the left arm (holding her bag and papers) is slightly to the rear; the right arm is forward; the head is slightly tilted—she is the epitome of confidence."

Mrs. Wrong "is a bundle of nerves; head downcast, bag clutched to her—the epitome of apologetic timidity."

Those who displayed a lack of appropriate deportment, she maintained, would cause suspicion and sometimes hostility, and the interviewee would be unresponsive to questioning, leading to poor survey results.

By 1939 Britain had declared war on Germany.

The Second World War caused major issues for a marketing research company that undertook direct interviews—quite a few of Ashby's researchers were reported by citizens suspicious of those asking questions during a time of war, and consequently they were detained by police.

At one point Ashby herself was vigorously questioned over several hours by the police, who accused her of "disloyalty" and threatened her with arrest if she did not stop surveying popular opinion on the war and the Prime Minister.