The End of Consumer Surveys… as Standalone Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Oct 08, 2008
A few weeks ago Ad Age ran an article "The End of Consumer Surveys?" that adds to the doom and gloom of the business world:
After issuing dire warnings about the future of consumer surveys, the two biggest advertisers and buyers of market research in the world -- Procter & Gamble and Unilever -- are linking with the Advertising Research Foundation for an industry effort to embrace online chatter and other naturally occurring feedback like never before.
"Without transforming our capabilities into approaches that are more in touch with the lifestyles of the consumers we seek to understand, the consumer-research industry as we know it today will be on life support by 2012," Kim Dedeker, VP-external capability leadership, global consumer and market knowledge at P&G, said.... "Our consumers have been sending us messages for years that they're not interested in the traditional survey process."
Dedeker is right that "the consumer-research industry as we know it today" will be gone in four years. It's obsolete now. Today, most of that research is done online, but with panelists recruited from a half-dozen or so leading Internet panel companies that extensively recruit people who are willing to take tediously long surveys in exchange for token incentives. The surveys are repetitive, boring and absurdly detailed. Any pretense of representative samples is gone. Consumer respondents are treated callously. The article goes on to argue that organizations need to do more text mining from social networks, online communities and retail sites.
This struck me as ironic since at the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver I was talking to marketers who were doing behavioral analytics and were desperate to supplement that with attitudinal research, from surveys. They see what visitors are doing on their web sites, but don't understand why. At the MRA show in New York, web marketers were attending so they could learn how to integrate survey research into their web analytics for the first time.
To develop a holistic view of customers, surveys were never sufficient by themselves. Now, with consumer conversations online and public, "eavesdropping" (text mining) definitely helps round out the picture. And with so many shopping interactions now online, behavioral analytics are now possible as well.
Surveys will always have a place, because sometimes what people are talking about isn't all you want to know, and because sometimes what they are doing doesn't make sense to you. Surveys will always have a place, which is why it is as important as ever to take steps to shorten surveys, to thoroughly profile consumer panelists and to treat your survey takers respectfully. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to build a consumer community like Novartis did.
Some other bloggers' perspectives on this Ad Age article:
So is it the end of consumer surveys? No, it is just the end of business as usual when it comes to consumer studies, and the end of consumer surveys as standalone research methods.