Editor's note: This is the second installment of an occasional series in which Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research, Van Nuys, Calif., presents humorous stories of life in the research trenches. Readers are invited to call or write Shulman with stories of their own.
Market research, like any profession, has a language of its own. Sometimes, we wouldn't want the general public to know how we talk to one another. For example, how do you think someone screened at the mall would feel if she knew that just because she didn't own a dog the interviewer was instructed to terminate her?
While at a large New York research firm, Alan Fine worked with a client who hadn't quite mastered research lingo. The client, an older gentleman from the marketing department, wanted up-to-the-minute results of a project. So he called Fine daily to ask for the "hand jobs."
Sometimes, interesting things happen because of language misunderstandings. For example, one embarrassed focus group hostess reports how she misunderstood a fatigued respondent, who kiddingly asked where he could take a nap. She directed him to the bathroom.
People also make mistakes with written words. I once gave a chicken-scrawled handwritten proposal, including a statistical plan, to my new secretary, an ambitious recent college grad with plans to really learn the market research business. A few hours later, as she handed me the typed proposal, she asked, "If you have time, could you please explain how to do the analysis of a fairy dance you recommended?"
Sometimes consumers say interesting things to us. Ellen Lady recalls a survey she conducted, a telephone callback on a toothpaste container with a cap that offered consumers the option of twisting it open or flipping it up. The respondent said that both she and her husband had tried the new toothpaste, reporting, "I guess you could just say that he screws and I flip."
A story is circulating about a British market research firm that conducted a telephone survey in the U.S. for its client, a company producing a birth control product for dogs. To obtain qualified households, the research company, not quite versed in the American idiom, instructed interviewers to introduce themselves and then ask, "Is there a bitch in your home?" Results indicated that when a male answered the phone, 76 percent replied in the affirmative, while the percentage was only in the teens when a woman answered. (One woman responded, "Speaking.")
Speaking of misunderstanding, Richard Gentner, now at Nestlé, once worked at a bank that sent out direct mail advertising with the headline, "Now You Can Have The Best Of Both Worlds." The mailing list, containing a large number of elderly consumers, was not quite current. As a result, the bank was shortly deluged by complaints of poor taste from the spouses of some of the deceased people the advertising had been mailed to.
We conducted a study of a fashion doll commercial, where, after seeing the commercial, girls were allowed to play with the doll. When asked if anything was different about the doll compared to what the commercial told her about it, one 6-year-old responded, "The doll didn't break in the commercial!" The interviewer wrote a parenthetical note in the questionnaire indicating that the doll broke while the child was playing with it.
Most kids responding to questionnaires tend to be shy and polite. One little girl, for example, when asked how she'd play with a new doll, said, "With my little sister, and very carefully." In contrast, a perhaps more truthful girl in the same survey said, "I'd break it over my bratty little brother's head."