Surveys are, in theory, a marketer’s best friend. A well-constructed survey composed of carefully engineered questions can deliver valuable marketing insights — and coveted statistical support for a strategic direction. To be effective, such a survey should focus on the specific aspects of a company’s brand that are most important to communicate and test. It should also allow for customer feedback in an open forum, offering a sense of personal interaction with the company, as well as an opportunity to discuss real-world issues.
The most valuable surveys typically employ a progressive numeric rating. In this system, each question allows for a range of answers, often numbered one through five, with responses progressing from “Very Positive” to “Positive” to “Neutral” to “Negative” to “Very Negative.” Such a rating system is a more sensitive gauge of personal experiences, preferences and opinions than relying on a simple “yes” or “no.” Averaging this broader array of responses then provides a more accurate overall picture of the targeted audience.
Too often, however, surveys go awry in both construction and usage. Questions that begin with phrases like “did you enjoy…” may be too “leading,” innately requesting a positive answer. Such questions, or those that are vague or unclear, can quickly distort a survey’s accuracy in portraying what a target audience actually thinks or feels. Similarly, questions written to enable a straight “yes” or “no” are often too narrow to elicit authentic responses. Survey users should also be wary of overvaluing judgments that were “created” to satisfy a survey question but wouldn’t have been made by survey participants on their own.
Of course, designing the survey is only half the battle. Perhaps even more problematic is reaching the right survey target. When developing a survey, the question of who you most want to survey is of paramount importance. An athletic goods company seeking to measure brand awareness may do better than to survey those exiting fast-food restaurants. Could that mother of three with thick eyeglasses and a super-sized milkshake be the mountain biker you’re looking for? Perhaps — but the broader question is whether your survey-proctor can recognize your best survey targets, and whether your survey process can screen out irrelevant data. This can be quite challenging — in many industries, the people your products matter to most may “look” the same and frequent the same public places as those who are never going to be genuinely interested in your market offerings.
One method to increase usable data obtained from a survey is to go where you will find a highly concentrated target pool. Online this can be achieved on blogs, message boards, or social networks of interest to a focused audience. Online survey placement can also entail purchasing advertising space on search browsers based on relevant search terms. Of course, this approach can create its own “skewed” results — when analyzing responses, you must keep in mind that you are looking at a group with predisposed preferences. To use our athletic goods company again, a survey conducted via a link to a social network of area runners clearly gets the survey in front of potential customers. And if what’s being tested is the price sensitivity of high-end running shoes, the company is surveying the right people. On the other hand, if they want to gauge broader perceptions of the company’s brand, “surveying the converted” may deliver misleading results.
Online surveys are also qualitatively different from those hand-proctored in public areas in that they cannot aim to engage a target audience at the point of brand interaction. Unless the survey regards an online community or Internet-related product, the survey taker will always be away from the natural environment where the brand or market offering resides. Without dismissing the advantages of our athletic goods company doing an online survey, clearly the computer screen and desk chair are far removed from the experience of mountain top snowboarding. By placing a survey into the private sphere of computer interaction, surveyors are asking participants to remember a certain experience rather than engaging them within that experience. Studies have shown that guests surveyed within a stadium venue, for example, respond differently than when they are surveyed online with the same series of questions. In particular, the time between the survey and the person’s last interaction with a particular brand or company has been shown to significantly affect how they evaluate their experience.
In short, to survey or not to survey is not the only question. Who and when and how to survey also merit close attention if you want accurate, actionable results. Returning to the lessons of Monty Python, we should remember that nobody expects to have their day interrupted by survey-proctors (biological or virtual) suddenly directing questions at them. Indeed, depending on your industry, your survey targets may never have thought about the intricacies of your brand until you asked them to. Finding valuable data is not just a matter of the right questions, but the right questions asked to the proper audience — while factoring in the ways that the audience has been affected by previous bias or the duration of time since brand interaction. If you want “Very Positive” survey results, don’t fall into the trap of hunting for the greatest amount of information — instead, seek the greatest amount of usable information that addresses a specific company concern.
As part of Kolbrener’s summer intern program, we asked each of our three interns to write an article on marketing. They were encouraged to consult with senior staff to sharpen their insights and polish their prose, with the incentive that the best essay would be published on our Web site. We were so impressed with their work, and the relevance of their topics for our readers, that we decided to publish all three. Monty Python Marketing was written by Erica Fetterman, a senior Communications major at Duquesne University whose previous experience includes an advertising/PR internship at Knoebels Amusement Resort.
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