The popular War Stories column, which presents humorous tales of life in the research trenches, is compiled by Art Shulman, president of Shulman Research in Van Nuys, Calif. If you want to share your own outlandish or otherwise entertaining experiences of research gone just-slightly awry, submit your own War Story today!
Market researchers can also be anthropologists!
About 40 years ago, when Cory Schwartz, who went on to found ConsumerQuest, was beginning his market research career, he worked for Mattel on Intellivision, one of the first video game systems. He prepared many primary reports on the system, as the company pioneered the emerging category.
Out of the blue he was recently contacted by two anthropology professors from the University of California regarding a book they were writing on Intellivision. The professors were searching for reports from the first years of the video game industry and asked if he had any old reports on the game.
Schwartz, perhaps a market research hoarder, went to his garage and pulled out a bin containing a stack of Intellivision reports from 1982-1983. He passed them along to the professors. He assumed the statute of limitation on handing over client data was past, or the material became in the public domain after a certain period, especially since the game met its demise a few years later.
The research reports were anthropological artifacts! Who knew?
In recounting this story, Schwartz advises that in no way does he condone the hoarding of 40-year-old research reports.
The responses supplied by respondents are so often very useful in helping to direct marketers. And then there are the head-scratchers – responses where it’s hard to decide whether the respondent is truly paranoid, a spy planted by a competitor or someone looking to troll the researcher.
Ellen Lady, of E.M. Lady & Associates, was recently going through old files when she found the following verbatim provided by a respondent in a telephone interview concerning recall of a particular shampoo commercial:
“It was about the newlyweds and they were getting ready to go to bed, and she had the husband, and they called for room service and asked for an umbrella and all kinds of weird things, like boots and an umbrella, and she had the boots on over her nightclothes walking up and down in the bedroom. Her husband went out to get some cough syrup, a knock on the door, she went to the door with the umbrella and the boots, as she was, and she opened. And this fellow had a nylon hose on his face, as a mask. She thought it was her husband. It wasn’t. It was a burglar. So she treated him the same as her husband, believing it was he. She walked to the bed, leading him on. Then, her real husband came in. So, when she realized it was he, she was so frightened, so her hiccups left and so did the burglar. Then they drank champagne. Then she went to shampoo her hair. The shampoo in the bottle is heavier, therefore the pearl in the bottle goes down more slowly. Some commercials make you feel so dumb, like some of the animals. The cat commercial for one. I like that turtle one, though. Turtles never run.”