The End of Consumer Surveys?

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Advertising Age warns of a growing trend among marketers: traditional market research techniques such as surveys and focus groups are just not appropriate or insightful for understanding user experience:

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.

"I don't know if we are going to have a choice but to move away from survey research," said Donna Goldfarb, VP-consumer and market insights for Unilever Americas, who will headline a Sept. 22 workshop ARF is hosting in New York.

"We continue to torture consumers with boring and antiquated search methods," she said. "What's holding us back is history and norms. But I work in a business where I think most of the senior leadership is still very frustrated with the tools that we are using."

"You can't ask people what they want, because what they say and what they do are two different things," said Artie Bulgrin, senior VP-research and sales for ESPN, another backer of the ARF effort. "We can actually improve our [initiative's] success rate if we just listen a bit more ... on a passive basis."

Source: Advertising Age: The end of consumer surveys?

Frank Spillers' Comment:

The online chatter analysis referred to in this article is officially called Virtual Ethnography (definition).  Virtual ethnography (online people watching) uses the free research playground of blogs, user comments, user reviews, buzz tracking and any type of consumer opinion shared whether in a Facebook group or on a personal product review site. Virtual ethnography is an extremly powerful technique and should not be underlooked. It may even be more insightful than web analytics, which are blinded by their statistical approach to tracking and predicting behavior.

Ethnographic research techniques rely on behavior analysis. You talk to people, observe, shadow, interview them all while watching and observing deeply. What's the big difference between usability research techniques and market research? Market research is opinion-based and usability research is behavior-based. Margaret Mead once said that what people think and what they think they think versus what they actually do are two entirely differnet things.

As an interesting aside, P&G and Unilever have also been leading (and profiiting) in their R&D efforts not just with usability research but with emotional design research approaches.

Here's a seminar I gave recently called Introduction to Emotion Design if you are new to the topic.