I’m a bit of a marketing geek – I freely admit it. In fact, my hiring policy has been based around an idea that a good friend of my wife shared with me a few years back. She believes that for a man to be attractive he has to have 10% geek: no more, no less. I’ve successfully applied that principle to building businesses from scratch and it’s a compelling mix.
But one manifestation of my ‘geek’ (frankly I probably knock the 10% ceiling from time to time) is responding to surveys. I guess it stems from wanting to see what marketers are up to and what they’re asking.
Of course, the cynical view is that surveys will (should) always tell you what you want to hear – and a big contributory factor sits in the way the questions are asked. The link is to a result from Google Book Search, btw. There are any number of illustrations of this point if you ‘conduct a google search‘ to support this further.
But the survey I looked at tonight was a classic case of forcing the answer you want. I was being asked about my view of some sponsored web content. Before I looked at the content, I had to visit the site in question.
During the survey, I was asked if I had visited, enjoyed and would be likely to revisit the content. I’d visited three of the eight content areas… but I was unable to continue with the survey unless I ticked a box that said I’d visited it. I therefore had to lie to proceed.
This is not an uncommon issue: there’s a tendency in surveys to insist on answers to questions, and it is simply a question of the survey authors not thinking through the options.
Research does, of course, have substantial value… but please don’t take it at face value. Sometimes people are less than scruplously honest… and it’s not always their fault.
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