Editor's note: War Stories is a semi-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 we received a report of an incident where a client observing a focus group actually fell through the mirror. But upon tracking it down, the owner of the facility where it purportedly happened said it was not true. So, we're still looking for an instance of this market research myth (at least it's a myth so far).
When Lloyd Wohlner of Isis Research was doing market research at a consumer magazine a few years ago, he mailed out a survey on topics his readers would like to see in future issues. One man mailed back a response indicating a high interest in hand tools and no interest in cars, which was a very unusual response compared to the magazine's typical male respondents. Then Wohlner checked the ZIP code against the original mailing list. The respondent lived in Ossining, N.Y. - Sing Sing prison to be exact. Wohlner wondered whether the respondent's interest in cars would increase after he used certain hand tools.
In his "On the Way" column in the January issue of Cactus Call, the newsletter of the Southwest Chapter of the Marketing Research Association, J. Patrick Galloway of Galloway Research noted that interviewers sometimes make cryptic notes on their questionnaires to explain things. For example, on an incomplete door-to-door callback questionnaire an interviewer wrote the letters SOP. Turned out this stood for "snake on porch." Another interviewer had written DAPP. Later, the interviewer explained that this meant the respondent had "died after product placement."
Galloway also cited a telephone study of recent appliance purchasers, where one 93-year-old respondent expressed an interesting view of extended warranties. Interviewer: "And why do you say you would 'definitely not' purchase an extended warranty for your new dishwasher?" Respondent: "Honey, at my age I don't even buy green bananas."
A researcher who prefers anonymity was in the back room observing one-on-one interviews on air fresheners. In the middle on an interview about creating a lovely-scented social evening, a respondent said to the moderator, "I'm a born-again Christian. Do you know what that is?" The respondent proceeded to try and "save" our moderator, who happened to be Jewish. The moderator was polite but didn't look at the literature left at the front desk, and to this day remains unconverted.
Doug Conwell of the Tampa Tribune reports conducting a focus group for an outside client, a local hospital. One participant at the group assumed that the Tribune was doing some kind of exposé of the hospital, where her husband had recently passed away due to a mistake. As soon as the group got started, during introductions, she told her tale of woe and was quite distraught. She went into all kinds of detail, sobbing madly, confessing to being suicidal and that she would never get over it, etc. The poor moderator, rather new to moderating, was at a loss as to how to continue the group effectively. After all, you can't really say, "Other than that, how did your husband like the food at the hospital?" It's like, "So Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
In future issues, we'll report on more quirky, loopy, and strange happenings in the world of market research. If you'd like your story to be told - anything related to research is usable, from spilling soup on your client's new suit to cute answers respondents provide on questionnaires - please e-mail me at artshulman@aol.com.