I survived the Thanksgiving weekend very well. I hope you did, too. I’m back and facing a week of crunching numbers and my first cub scout pack meeting. A bit stressful and focused, it will be. So a rant is in order just to let out some stress…
Coming in this morning, my mind flipped back to a phone survey I endured last week. It was a marketing survey for a major telco services company. Since buying such services is one of my ‘hats’ here, I assented, then suffered, the survey.
“When you think of phone and data services, which brands do you think of?”
And so it started. I rated different brands in youthfulness, trustworthiness, pricing. I replied with answers that were quicker and duller as the questions got more…more…insipid….circituous? Well the questions just got to be more and more. Then when they started asking me about TV commercials, I knew what brand was behind all these questions.
In all, the survey probably ran 20 minutes. Good grief!
And all this data of these vague questions will end up on some VP-Marketing’s desk as a 360-degree-view of the marketplace and their new ad campaign. And the data will be so muddy it will all be thrown out.
Can’t they ask the questions they really want to ask:
- Have you seen our new ad campaign?
- Do you think this boosts our brand image?
- Will these ads help you remember our brand?
- Did you learn anything about our services?
- Are you more likely to buy or renew our services?
Yes/no questions only, because, unless your brand and campaign are stellar, I’m only going to vote somewhere in the middle, and so is everyone else.
Let’s not beat around the bush when making survey questions, folks. You get crappy data and you waste my time and patience. And please, keep it focused to 10 questions or less.
My 2 worst survey experiences.First an airline satisfaction survey, with multiple questions of half a page long, read out over the phone. Second, a 20-page appraisal survey from the European Commission (by mail), where each question was a matrix question on a page, asking to rate something on a dozen criteria on a scale of 1-10. Or how to do 20 surveys-in-one.Both surveys must have produced thin, absolutely meaningless data.As for quick and lean binary-question surveys, I find the market is so saturated that nobody bothers, whatever you do.
My 2 worst survey experiences.First an airline satisfaction survey, with multiple questions of half a page long, read out over the phone. Second, a 20-page appraisal survey from the European Commission (by mail), where each question was a matrix question on a page, asking to rate something on a dozen criteria on a scale of 1-10. Or how to do 20 surveys-in-one.Both surveys must have produced thin, absolutely meaningless data.As for quick and lean binary-question surveys, I find the market is so saturated that nobody bothers, whatever you do.
Amen. Unpleasant experiences like this are forever joined with the product they “promote,” in my mind at least.
Amen. Unpleasant experiences like this are forever joined with the product they “promote,” in my mind at least.