Last year I heard an industry observer warn an audience of client- and vendor-side people that it wasn’t other research companies or fellow researchers that they should be worried about making them irrelevant. Rather, he said, it was the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google that were the bigger threats to eat marketing research’s collective lunch.

Well, based on the late-March announcement of its long-rumored Consumer Surveys service, Google appears to be sharpening its cutlery.

In a nutshell, Google is positioning the service to everyone from Fortune 500 companies to “the local bike shop” as a fast, low-cost response to traditional research (which, Google notes in a promotional video, can be “slow and expensive”) that allows users to test product pricing, packaging concepts or measure brand awareness, etc., one question at a time.

Respondents must first answer the survey question in order to gain access to premium content on the Web, such as news articles or videos, rather than having to sign in or pay to do so – in theory making the taking of the one-question survey a painless and free way to get what they want and thereby increasing response rates. Publishers of the sites bearing that premium content are paid as their users respond to Google Consumer Surveys questions.

Google is offering an explanatory white paper by Paul McDonald, Matt Mohebbi and Brett Slatkin at www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/static/357980479559206563/consumer_surveys_whitepaper.pdf. And more info is also available at www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys.

Been predictable

Online reaction to the debut has been predictable, ranging from doom-filled to ho-hum, mostly depending on whose ox is being gored. Those at firms already offering similar DIY-ish tools tried to put a positive spin on things by noting that the advent of Google Consumer Surveys proves the viability of their own services. One anonymous wag posted a less confident view: “I think everyone in the industry just peed their pants.”

For its part, Google is saying all the right things, in terms of making sure the service won’t lead to bad surveys and correspondingly bad data. Danny Sullivan, writing on marketingland.com, posted snippets of an e-mail interview he did with Google’s Paul McDonald.

“I think your concerns about the quality of the data from self-service survey platforms are well known in the research community,” McDonald wrote. “As the mantra goes, ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’... We try to encourage survey best practices in our help content, program policies and by providing survey templates to guide new researchers. For example, leading questions, push-polling and irrelevant survey text are all prohibited.

“In the end we are providing a platform which can be used to create professional and statistically accurate surveys. We believe users who view these reports can spot questions that will lead to a biased result and will make a call on the effectiveness of the survey creator.”

Wresting of control

Where does this leave the industry? Only time will tell. The real threat doesn’t seem to be a worsening of research’s image but rather a potential wresting of control of the platforms and vehicles by which it is conducted. Think about it: Google has its own operating system that powers hundreds of millions of mobile phones and computing devices around the world. It controls a large percentage of the process of online search and online advertising. It sits on an impossibly huge pile of transactional and behavioral data.

I’m not prescient enough to know what all of that means. But I do know that it demands our continued attention and, potentially, more than a little of our fear.