Editor’s note: War Stories is an occasional column in which Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research, Van Nuys, Calif., presents humorous anecdotes of life in the research trenches.

Diane Trotta of Trotta Associates was planning to conduct a research project in France and sent an e-mail to prospective subcontractors there requesting costs for recruiting female cat owners. The question she received back from one of her contacts was, “Suppose the owner does not know if the cat is a female or male?”

Gary S. Martin of Savitz Research Solutions reports that several years ago he was conducting a focus group on a new wireless security concept in which the discussion touched on everything from burglary to fire detection. At one point, the facility’s fire alarm went off. Martin opened the door to see what was going on and smelled smoke. He got all of the clients out of the back room and respondents and clients walked down three flights of stairs to safety. By the time they got outside, multiple fire trucks were there and firemen were racing into the building.

Martin gathered all of the respondents together and the clients stood to the side. The respondents asked if, with all the activity going on around them, they should continue the session on the front lawn. Martin actually considered it for a second before dismissing the idea.
That’s when a member of the client company came over, along with his executive management team, and asked, “What do you normally do in these situations?”

Martin drew a blank but he eventually ended up rescheduling the group. The facility did not charge for the reinvitation of the original respondents and every respondent except one showed up for the makeup session.

Now Martin says he knows what to “normally” do.

Doug Schorr of Schorr Creative Solutions had just wrapped up some insightful focus groups for a fast-food client, clearly talking to the primary demographic for his client: young men ages 18 to 24. The running joke, found among respondents across several markets, was that this particular restaurant was great after a night of partying and smoking (not cigarettes).

As Schorr left the facility and was walking through the parking garage he reached a beat-up old van that seemed to belong in a Cheech and Chong movie. The van’s large sliding side door opened and out wafted a cloud of pot smoke, followed by a laughing respondent from one of the recently-ended groups. The fellow more or less tumbled from the vehicle, higher than a kite. He looked at Schorr and said that all of the talk of food and smoking in the focus group created an urge that he just couldn’t pass up.

Sometimes clients from other countries are not fully in touch with their business in the United States, as Michael Stanat of SIS International Research learned. His client, a foreign manufacturer of an unusual-looking, unconventional vacuum cleaner, wanted his firm to conduct an observational study in retail outlets to gauge actual purchase behavior.

The first problem was that the product was sold only over the Internet (Stanat’s firm finally determined this after trying to locate retail outlets selling the product). The second was that even if the product had been sold at retail outlets, market share was so low that finding someone who was actually shopping for the product would have been very costly.

Once this was explained to the client, the nature of the project was changed. Stanat’s firm was assigned the task of observing the actual “normal” use of the product in the homes of consumers who’d purchased the item. The client expected that consumers purchased the vacuum because of its versatility, as was the case in the home country, and he wanted to determine consumers’ perceptions of the product’s effectiveness in vacuuming sofas as well as floors. The only problem was that once interviewers managed to find buyers who’d let them into their homes, these customers clearly used the product only for vacuuming carpets and floors. Unlike in the home country, no one used it to vacuum sofas. So much for the client’s expectations!