Editor’s note: War Stories is an occasional column in which Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research, Van Nuys, Calif., presents humorous anecdotes of life in the research trenches.
Ed Sugar of On-Line Communications tells about an experience early in his career. He worked in the tabulation department of a market research company doing a home usage study on a female contraceptive cream. One of the questions asked of respondents was to rate the product on a number of attributes, including ease of use. Those who rated the product low on ease of use were asked why they gave that rating.
One respondent replied, “It was hard to use with nails.” Upon reading this response, Sugar and his fellow workers in the tab department, all males, thought this was hysterical. The image of a woman dipping a metal nail, the kind you buy at the hardware store, into the cream, and then applying it, was extremely comical to them.
For some reason, the unmanicured bunch of male coders couldn’t figure out that it was fingernails that the respondent was referring to.
Alan Fine of KaleidOScope Marketing tells about doing a focus group where at the start of the group an 8-year-old boy asked Fine if he could borrow some cash! That was a first for him. He told the kid there was a Bank of America around the corner with an ATM machine!
Merle Holman of Group Dynamics in Focus reports that AT&T was testing a new phone for people who were blind. The groups were recruited and, on a cold winter’s day the first group came to the facility by drivers, taxis and public transportation. Two even had Seeing Eye dogs. They were greeted and their coats were hung up.
When the session was over they approached the hostesses for their outer garments. As Holman and the hostesses pulled the coats from the closet they realized that the respondents could not identify the coats by size or color!
For the next group their names were pinned to the coats.
Stefan Doomanis’ firm Dynamic Advantage does mystery shopping. One of the most important pieces of information collected for a particular client was the name of the employee at the counter, complete with a picture of that employee. In most cases the shopper is able to get an employee’s name. However there are times where any employee is not wearing a name badge, or the badge could be covered by other clothing, a sweater, jacket or maybe an apron.
Only once in Doomanis’ years of experience has he ever come across a certain problem: The employee at the counter of one store was crashed out, completely asleep! If she was wearing a name badge, the shopper would never know. In this instance, a few taps on the window did not wake her up. The shopper was able to complete the rest of the shop and snap a picture of the napping employee.
Doomanis also reports that after a recent meeting he and his co-worker decided to stop at a local coffeehouse before heading back to the office. They found parking and walked up to the coffeehouse and were greeted by a sign on the door which said, “CAUTION! These doors are now broken due to being opened the wrong way. Please open it the right way and PULL it. Sorry about the inconvenience. Thanks.”
To Doomanis the sign in effect said, “Our dumb customers broke our door by opening it the wrong way.”
After thinking about it for a minute while standing in line inside (without having been greeted upon entrance), they decided the sign was indeed indicative of the establishment’s overall attitude. So they took themselves down the street an extra block to the next coffeehouse.