Ashby Research Service aggregated collection of records

fonds

approximately 1937-1967

9661411

20.9 metres of textual material (123 boxes and 2 outsize folders)

Sylvia Rose Ashby (1908-1978), market researcher, migrated with her family to Melbourne ca. 1913 and settled at Hawthorn. In the late 1920s Ashby was employed by J. Walter Thompson Australia Pty Ltd, a recently established branch of the American advertising agency. She enrolled at the University of Melbourne in 1930, but was moved to the firm's Sydney office; she worked in the market research and psychology departments in both Melbourne and Sydney under Rudolph Simmat and W. A. McNair before going abroad in 1933.
Back in Sydney by 1936, Sylvia Ashby set up the Ashby Research Service which she was to promote as the first 'independent' market-research agency in Australia. One of her first commissions was to study the local market for (Sir) Frank Packer's Australian Women's Weekly in 1937.
Sylvia Ashby's clients were diverse and included the National Bank of Australasia which was interested in the use of safe-deposit boxes, the Australian Gas Light Co. which was interested in its workforce as well as its clients, and the Pick-me-up Condiment Co. Ltd which was interested in baked beans. As investigators, Ashby employed mainly married women whom she thought made the best interviewers. At busy times she hired John Stuart Lucy, a journalist from New Zealand, who contributed much to the business. She married him on 4 November 1939 at St Peter's Anglican Church, Watsons Bay. Some reports in the 1940’s were prepared by her husband for his company Market and Consumer Research Pty Ltd. In 1940 Sylvia Ashby was commissioned by Sir Keith Murdoch, director-general of information, to conduct a survey on the war effort, almost certainly the first Australia-wide survey of public opinion. Meanwhile Sylvia was sampling New South Wales opinion for the Sydney press and surveying commercial radio audiences. After the war she continued to take polls on referenda and on Federal elections.

Sylvia Ashby's most important postwar venture was the Ashby Consumer Panel, being a network of housewives who kept regular shopping diaries of goods purchased. Launched in 1945 in Sydney and then gradually extended, the panel tried to monitor what householders were buying (brand, type, size, variety, flavour and so on), where they shopped and how much each purchase cost. The panel comprised about three thousand households, each taking part for up to three years. A 'Baby Panel', to monitor purchases made for infants, was also established in 1962. By 1967 Ashby Research Service had 30 office staff and 250 interviewers. Early in 1974, Sylvia Ashby sold the business to Beacon Research Co. Pty Ltd. and calculated that Ashby's had been involved in no fewer than 3573 pieces of market research.

References:
Murray Goot, 'Ashby, Sylvia Rose (1908–1978)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ashby-sylvia-rose-9390/text16499, accessed 22 January 2013 (accessed 22/01/2013) and compiled from the collection.

COLLECTION 1
Ashby Research Service records, ca. 1937-ca. 1972

COLLECTION 2
Ashby Research Service further records, ca 1941-1950

COLLECTION 3
Ashby Research Service presentation folders 1961-1967