Survey Reboots: Channeling Hawaii 5-0, Battlestar & Star Trek
Posted by Vovici Blog on Sun, Apr 10, 2011
An earlier version of this article was originally published in the Vovici monthly newsletter.
When my wife said she wanted to pick a new show from the fall lineup for us to watch together each week, we agreed to watch Hawaii 5-0. I have fond memories of the original, love the theme song, and, after seeing the first episode, I like the scenery. The shots of Hawaii are nice, too…
One of the stars of Hawaii 5-0 is Grace Park – this is her second reimagined TV series, as she starred in SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica as Lt. Sharon “Boomer” Valerii. Hollywood does love its “reboots”: the executive producers of Hawaii 5-0, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, had the widely popular movie reboot of Star Trek last year.
How can you apply a Hollywood approach to your research initiatives?
- Remake – A remake typically updates the same basic characters and plot to a modern setting (think Harrison Ford’s take on “The Fugitive”). Many web surveys started out as remakes: taking a survey that was done by paper or via telephone and remaking it for the World Wide Web. Like any good Hollywood remake, you have to change things to be successful. You want to cover the same basic information while leveraging the new medium. Was there information you asked participants for in the paper survey that you can now load behind the scenes from your CRM database? If it was a telephone survey, can you now show the respondent some graphics that will make the results more accurate while improving the respondent experience (for instance, photographs of products)? What does the new medium let you do that was off the table before?
- Reboot – Lifting a page from comic books, which would often set aside all continuity to restart story lines, Hollywood seeks brands that have grown stale but still have positive brand equity that can be leveraged to relaunch a film or TV series. For reboots, think of 2009’s hit “Star Trek” movie or the new “Batman” movies (“Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight”). From a research perspective, we see our fair share of reboots of NPS programs, where NPS just didn’t fit the industry (especially when stretched to B2B) or where it wasn’t producing the types of actionable information that was needed. The goal remains the same for a reboot – in this case, to build customer loyalty – but the approach is completely changed to develop a company-appropriate customer loyalty segmentation that can be used to drive continual improvement.
- Flop – Nathin Rubin argues in The Boston Globe that Hollywood flops represent important learning experiences: “Ishtar” retrained Hollywood to avoid huge budgets for comedies, and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” was the first major movie filmed completely against a blue screen, paving the way for “Sin City”, “300” and “Avatar”. Back in the land of surveys, the first time we used PayPal to pay survey respondents it seemed like a stroke of genius (circa 2004), but consumers thought we were trying to cheat them out of their incentive checks. We ended up having to apologize and offer paper checks to everyone. We’re not called on to offer a lot of survey incentives, but when we do we now offer respondents the option of how they want to be paid.
- Sequel – One of the best professional experiences of my career was being invited back to England to conduct a follow-on survey for Digital Equipment. Nothing can be better than when a research project is so well received that you get to do it again. Whether it’s taking the annual customer satisfaction study and doing it the next year, or taking the work you did for one product or department and doing it for another, sequels are the bread and butter of successful research. Just like Hollywood: “Harry Potter 7”, “Pirates of the Caribbean 4”, “ Chronicles of Narnia 3”, “ Men in Black 3”, “ Transformers 3”, “ Kung Fu Panda 2”, etc.
Here’s to Customer Sat 3D!