You don’t know what you think about all sorts of things. At least, you don’t know what you will think in the future about them.

The reason you don’t know what you’ll think is that you (like everyone else) struggle to take into account the dramatic extent to which context will influence your response to any particular issue or question.

Your unconscious mind is busy processing information from all your senses, a task far too demanding for your conscious mind, which is much more inclined towards a ‘one thing at a time’ state of affairs.

This is a big problem for market research because, in the quest to understand what people think, methodologies are used that are really good at getting answers to questions and really bad at providing the context in which the real issue takes place.

This is illustrated beautifully by the differences that emerge when different platforms are used to ask the same questions in the same order: telephone surveys, face-to-face interviews and on-line methods will produce statistically different responses.

New technology presents new opportunities for gathering customer insights.  Often these reflect the benefits of technology; they’re fast and relatively inexpensive.  In consumer psychology terms this makes such methodologies an easy purchase: consumers, be they in stores or in corporate research functions, are frequently beguiled by ‘easy’.

The possibility that a new research might offer the same insights more quickly and for less money is appealing.  And unless an organisation conducts duplicate research simultaneously to compare the affect of the methodology, they will never know what influence the new context is having.

A number of research companies have sought to exploit the instantaneous communication potential of mobile (cell) phones: using text messaging to conduct research and this, it would seem, is particularly risky.

Research due to be published later this month reveals something very interesting about the extent to which people are prepared to lie over different communication platforms.

In the experiments people took part in a trading game with some assigned to be brokers who were rewarded for selling stocks and others buyers who were rewarded if their stock picks performed well.  The communication was conducted four platforms:

• Face-to-face
• Audio
• Video
• Text Message

Unbeknownst to the buyers, brokers were given inside information that the stock was rigged to lose half its value.  The researchers wanted to see if the communication medium affected whether this was communicated to, so they checked with them whether or not the inside information had been passed on or not.

People were most likely to report honesty, not in face-to-face situations, but under the focused lens of a video link: the likelihood is that a greater sense of self-awareness caused them to act in a way that was more honourable.

In contrast, people communicating via text messages were 95% more likely to report having been deceived.

This experiment raises significant questions for any market research technique that is collected by typed response, be it text message or on-line questionnaire.  Frequently, there is the possibility that someone will feel inclined to deceive with an answer to a question.  Perhaps their accurate response would reflect badly on them.  Alternatively, they simply want to bash out some answers so that they’ll be entered for the prize draw that’s being offered as an incentive.

There are many reasons why asking questions away from the context of the consumer’s behaviour will lead to inaccurate responses: some research techniques might claim to get beyond this issue by providing an instant means of communicating with the customer.  However, this study shows that a text-based solution may not be the solution it at first appears.

Source: Wichita State University (2012, January 25). People lie more when texting, study finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 1, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2012/01/120125131120.htm

Image courtesy: Daniele Margaroli