In
the politically charged environment, I noticed that surveys are often used as a
tool (arguably) to form public opinion. The research and analysis is inspiring
and made me wonder if the insights could be directly used towards marketing
effectiveness?
A recent HBR article stated that polls dramatically over-estimate
support for third-party candidates, when very little actually exists. The
premise being “naming any third-party candidate” will garner more votes
from responders who are on the fence about Clinton or Trump. However, it won’t
translate into real ballot due to the lack of familiarity with these
candidates. The revealing conclusion was that the independent candidates cannot
be overly optimistic about the survey results, since being named in the survey
will alone get you some votes, but the actual support may be much less than
that.
Now
let’s think marketing surveys – most tend to be “leading” the respondents, so we as
marketers can get specific data that we “like.” Not a good sign, if you are
banking on survey results to build the business case for a new product/service
and have been leading the consumers into picking an answer on the survey. The
responses will point to what’s listed on the survey, instead of providing an
insight into how much do the consumers know about and/or need the new offering.
Another
related and interesting reference in the above article was to a book on “Answering
questions versus revealing preferences,” by Zallar and Feldman. The research
argued that responders are not necessarily revealing “considered opinions,
instead are just answering questions quickly.” The responses do shift based on
the answers choices given!
If I were to summarize in marketing context;
“Educate and NOT lead
the consumer to get a more considered opinion.”
This
is an important consideration, when designing the survey and considering the
responses. Consumers are not sitting around thinking about our new product or
service, so a “considered opinion” is the last thing we should expect. However,
we can still strive to help them provide a considered opinion through a better
survey design, in terms of educating the consumer about the purpose, product/service, benefits and goals. How we do that will depend upon the specified goals, but the results will be closer to a considered opinion, rather than a multiple choice selector.
The
article brought to fore some pertinent nuances, even while drawing attention to more
common approaches employed, such as, be specific and short, or squeeze in a few more questions to get more responses. But, it
is up to us to decide if we want “more” data or “quality” data. The choice is
ours!
