NEW YORK--Improved technology for measuring visioncare products and services now allows VisionWatch to offer a broadened view of the total eyecare marketplace.

Using updated methods of analyzing the complete market, based on an in-depth study of consumer buying patterns, VisionWatch estimates the overall visioncare business sold at optical retail locations at $22.8 billion for calendar 2004.

VisionWatch, a joint venture of Jobson LLC and the Vision Council of America, is a continuous consumer study that interviews more than 100,000 consumers on an annual basis.

Source: VisionWatch
"In 2000 Jobson and its partner NOP-World launched VisionWatch, a study specifically designed to measure the breadth of the marketplace for visioncare products and services," explained Gerry Fultz, director of Jobson Optical Research. "The technology employed was far superior to previous methodologies and remains cutting edge today."

 

The information produced by VisionWatch provides not only a much broader view of vision-related markets, according to Fultz, but also much finer detail on areas of the market that had been measured using earlier technologies.

Source: VisionWatch

"To share this information with all those participating in or interested in these markets, we have initiated two basic improvements in the State of the Market data Jobson has provided for more than a decade," Fultz said. "The first revision is to include areas of the market that were previously not part of the measurement, such as refractive surgery and eye examinations. The second revision is to make some relatively minor adjustments in the retail dollar estimates associated with frames, prescription lenses and contact lenses."

To measure trending consistently, these revisions were applied to the statistics for the year ended December 2003 as well as the year ended December 2004, Fultz noted.