What’s Happening Nowadays With Survey Samples? (Part 2)
Why The MR Industry Should Start Collectively Caring About Data Quality
In his recent LinkedIn post, JD Deitch offered two explanations on why the sample market is what it is right now and has been for the past two decades: clients either don’t know or don’t care how bad the quality of data sample they’ve been receiving. Between not knowing and not caring, the latter is the more egregious of the two.
In Part 1 of this series, we touched on the challenges presently faced by the sample market: participant engagement, polling representivity and fraud as illustrated by the Op4G / Slice MR scandal. Of the three, fraud captures the most attention, the one that makes headlines, the one that stirs up the most discussion and calls for resolution. The threat of fraud is in everyone’s mind, and that’s why there are measures and protections in place and constantly being developed to detect and address it.
Fraud, however, may not be the key issue out of the three. In the Greenbook podcast, Deitch has pointed to participant engagement as a long-standing challenge that the industry has always been aware of and has tried multiple times to solve. Fraud has always been tagged with large sum of dollars lost or deceptively gained; what most don’t see or take into account is how much revenue or opportunity is missed because of bad or low quality data generated by poor engagement. Yes, fraud undermines credibility and trust in the industry but there always has been avenues to regain them; market failures due to poor data quality may not be as visible but the damage they create linger and influence. And that damage through the decades has now translated to the indifference clients feel towards sample data being produced. As Deitch puts it, “Most survey research projects just don’t matter enough for clients to demand better.”
The current product coming out of the sample market has been commoditized enough that they hardly affect business decisions. Clients don’t see enough value or endorse the same level of confidence in the present product to justify spending more to learn or find out what people are thinking. And if an alternative like AI comes along, clients are roused enough to spend and explore what the other options offer.
“Companies will always want to know what people think. That need isn’t going away.” And this is why renewed focused on the participant experience becomes key. Rather than settle for respondents who have time to fill out questions, find and attract people that are the most invested and involved in the subject matter. Incentivize them for their time and underscore why their thoughts and feelings matter. Connect and foster a healthy yet professional relationship with them. Encourage them to find or refer similar personalities. Build and maintain an engaged panel of quality participants.
New and emerging technology excites clients and investors so look into leveraging them into your methods and processes. Learn the best way to implement AI. Don’t simply deploy new tech to cut costs and time; discover where AI would complement human talent the most and where human supervision is most critical. Collaborate with tech people and developers to design and build systems and applications aligning with your goals and values.
The level of care and effort market research agencies put into their research work would always reflect in the end-product. At Nimbus Online, we believe excellent and high quality data resonates, and we’re confident it will strike chords in clients to make them care enough. And when clients care enough, they’ll be willing to find out and demand more.
To learn more about how we leverage inspired human thinking with modern cutting edge technology to achieve high quality market research for our clients, please contact us here.
