Editor’s Note: "War Stories" is a regular feature in which Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research, Van Nuys, Calif., presents humorous stories of life in the research trenches.
While consulting statistical abstracts to obtain some figures about the composition of the U.S. population, I uncovered an interesting fact. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, in 1993 there were 56.8 million married men in the U.S., slightly fewer than the 57.7 million married women. Must be all the polygamists in Utah!
David Weiss of the National Decorating Products Association reports a mail survey he conducted where consumers were asked to indicate the most recent room where they used paint or a coating like varnish or sealer. Most consumers wrote in the conventional "living room" or "den" or "deck." One macabre respondent, however, wrote in "casket."
Sometimes in market research, death can be fun. Dick Kurtz of CMR Market Research reports that early in his career he went out to conduct door-to-door interviews in a poor rural area in the outskirts of Charlotte, N.C. He knocked on the door of a ramshackle house on a street with no name and was informed that the inhabitants had just returned from a funeral. Kurtz was about to apologize for intruding when one of the family members indicated that not only would the woman do the interview but they wanted him to stay for the "party." Kurtz says the food and music were great.
Kurtz also cites another door-to-door study where he went to great lengths to get an interview. At one house, a woman agreed to do the interview on the condition that Kurtz pretend to be her husband to fool a pesky salesman. It seems the salesman had talked her into buying a vacuum cleaner the prior day and was scheduled to arrive shortly to collect the check.
Sure enough, the salesman soon showed up and Kurtz, then a naive young researcher, convinced the salesman that "his wife" had been high-pressured to buy the overpriced vacuum cleaner and didn’t want it. Kurtz refused the salesman’s offer of a personal demonstration of the vacuum cleaner, and felt that he did his part to improve the image of market researchers and their ability to serve consumers. Afterwards, Kurtz collected his hard-earned reward - he completed the interview.
Sherry Haub of Bernstein-Rein Advertising cites a focus group on roach traps she conducted early in her career. The session was held in one of the loveliest rooms she ever moderated in, with plants everywhere and a large skylight highlighting a big round marble table. The table featured a plateful of elegant goodies for respondents to snack on, surrounded by a dozen of the client’s roach traps, the intended subject of discussion.
The group was progressing nicely when suddenly all faces in the room registered surprise, then puzzlement, then dawning consternation as they noticed the Madagascar-sized roach perched insolently on the edge of the goodies plate, safe amid the armada of roach traps it had so casually negotiated on its way to the snacks.
A story in a prior War Stories column relating to women in focus groups adjusting their underwear in front of the one-way mirror inspired public relations consultant Bob Schechter to relate some of his experiences while at Bali Bras, a division of Hanes. In one study, a woman kept complaining about the buckles in her bra. When the moderator asked why, the woman informed the moderator that she was the Texas trap and skeet shooting champion, and when she shot 300 times a day the buckle bit into her shoulder. The moderator wondered how projectable that respondent was to the general population.
Schechter also described a bra focus group where an older, overweight woman brought her fellow respondents to tears by describing to the young women in the group how her long-time husband still regularly bought her sexy lingerie and told her how desirable she was and how much he was still in love with her.