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.
A few weeks ago I called a field agency (which shall remain nameless) to get some cost estimates for aproject we were doing. My usual contact was out of the office so I dealt with a representative who had not been with the firm very long. I introduced myself and he told me curtly that he was on the phone with a client, and could I try again later. I called again later and he told me that he had only a minute or two and asked if I could give him all the information in that time. I’ll try, I said, a little miffed that I again wasn’t being treated with clienfly respect. When I began giving him the specifications, he exclaimed, "Oh, you’re that Art Shulman, the client Art Shulman. I’m so sorry. Earlier today someone named Shulman called me on the phone, trying to sell me something."
"That was me calling," I informed him.
"No, it was another Shulman," he insisted, "selling me telephone service or a health plan or something." He then apologized profusely. I told him that wasn’t necessary - as long as he agreed to be in my Amway group.
Market researchers are often confused with telemarketers, but it’s unusual for your supplier to be that confused.
Have you ever noticed how some people tend to use idiomatic expressions that are somehow related to their subject matter? For example, when a food-service client told me that a project was delayed, she said it was being put on the back burner. This was just after a home improvement center client had discussed the nuts and bolts of a project with me. A few days ago, a client from a consumer electronics store, who had just returned from a long vacation, told me he was getting his batteries recharged.
Anybody else out there have any similar experiences?
Some researchers are well compensated and others aren’t. Marion Simon of Marion Simon Research Service reports that an interviewer working for her company also had another job. Simon said she needed the interviewer to work on an important project, but the woman was scheduled to work at her other job at that time. Simon finally convinced the interviewer to work on her project by promising the woman two heads of cabbage and three bunches of carrots. The woman, who was working hard at a diet, quickly accepted.
Simon didn’t indicate whether she also compensated the woman with money.
Simon also recalls an interviewing project her firm conducted at a restaurant. The interviewer was, shall we say, rather well endowed, and while turning after completing the interview, she accidentally hit a man with one of her boobs. She began to apologize profusely, when the man said, "Don’t worry about it. I’ve been a widower for quite a while and this is the first thrill I’ve had in a year."
Bill Sartain, president of Focused Solutions Marketing Research, recalls a group he moderated in a motel room in a very small town in southeast Georgia some years ago. During one group made up of "heavy" male beer drinkers, one of the respondents persisted in firing off expletives about a particular brand of beer. But it was only after he began assailing those who were "dumb enough to drink that s---" that another respondent took issue. The next thing Sartain knew, the two 300-plus-lb. respondents were nose to nose, pushing and shoving each other, and the scene became very ugly as the other respondents egged on the combatants.
Fortunately, calmer heads prevailed after the four clients in the adjacent room came bolting in to the rescue and the two were separated and sent packing in their pick-ups, which of course had gun racks in the back windows. Sartain says he was never really worded since their bellies were so big they couldn’t have reached one another with their fists.