Can You Trust Political Polling, Consumer Research or TV Ratings? - Steve Blacker

1. Political polling research has several major consumer behavior flaws. For example, undecided voters when seeing a particular candidate is ahead may decide they will vote for the person who seems most likely to win. Conversely, seeing their candidate is significantly down in the polls could discourage someone from taking the time to vote for their candidate figuring it doesn't matter.

2. Given the low turn-out we have for most elections; even people who claim they will vote often do not. Ironically, often times a major TV or cable station will start predicting potential results based upon exit polls even though people are still voting. Thus, often times rather than predict accurate outcomes political polling may well influence it.

3. Nine out of ten new products fail in the market place. Why? Because most often companies will test a concept instead of showing an actual product. Without people being able to see the actual product, hold it, examine the packaging etc. the consumer research is taking place in a major reality void. Most people tend to like new product concepts until they actually have to decide to purchase the product.

4. When Coca Cola tested their New Cola everyone liked it a great deal. Unfortunately they did not ask people how they would feel if the New Coke replaced the current one. The actual market place results were disastrous and the New Coke became history.

5. Nielsen is a highly regarded and capable research company. But imagine the type of viewer who would actually keep a daily log of the programs they watched? A better solution may occur some day when TV sets may actually be able to measure viewing habits automatically.

6. While research is a multi-billionaire dollar a year business it still remains mostly misunderstood because of the terminologies lack of practical market place and marketing applications. Whether or not someone buys a product or watches a TV show is nice to know. What's much more important is why that action takes place. This is an area where most research falls short. Why? Because the wrong questions are often asked. For example, rather than give a consumer a list of things i.e. supposed brand attributes to check off why not ask them more open ended questions such as what one thing/improvement could be made to this product to make you want to buy it?

7. Open ended questions create a wealth of verbatims that if properly analyzed and interpreted will dramatically impact your results. Creating the right open ended questions is much more a marketing function than research. Setting up an actual display rack along with your competitors and having one hundred actual customers shop it, while you monitor their comments will often be much more predictable and accurate than a traditional survey of five thousand or more people. It also costs much less.

Steve's most recent book You Can't Fall Off The Floor - The Insiders' Guide to Re-Inventing Yourself and Your Career chronicles his 50 year career working for over 25 different companies with 189 lessons learned and insider tips from Gayle King, Cathie Black, Chuck Townsend and 28 others; Blacker is still going strong today as a partner in Frankfurt & Blacker Solutions, LLC. His web site is blacker-reinventions.com and e-mail address is blackersolutions@aol.com

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