People Lie – So what do we do about it?

I just finished taking a survey sent to me by a local arts venue where I’ve attended

events in the past. The survey asked me to indicate how often I go to cultural events

and I noticed a strange urge in myself to overstate the number of events I go to in order

to make myself feel more cultured than perhaps I really am. I believe I successfully

fought that urge but as a consumer market researcher it’s worrisome to me to think that

I’m probably like most people and usually want to say the right thing and highlight my

positives while downplaying or downright ignoring perceived negatives.

I saw a similar phenomenon first hand a few years ago after conducting some focus

groups for a Spanish language television commercial and later running the ad through

quantitative testing.

In the focus groups the respondents, in this case Hispanic women, said the ad was too

sexual in nature and offended them. In the quantitative research the ad score very

highly on likability, recall sores and surprisingly high for persuasion. So were the focus

group participants truly offended or were they too embarrassed to say they liked the ad?

Did the anonymity of the quantitative setting allow for greater truthfulness? Or perhaps

the ad was working on a subconscious level and those that were perhaps truly offended

were still somehow drawn to the product when it came time to make a purchase

decision.

As professionals who either gather or use Hispanic consumer insights we have to

address these questions when designing surveys and/or analyzing results. I personally

like qualitative research to generate ideas and reveal aspects of the product or concept

that perhaps we were overlooking but I take most comments related to likes/dislikes

with a grain of salt. For those I prefer quantitative research and better-yet, indirect

measures of like/dislike and purchase intent such as asking people to select products

they would buy from a virtual shelf prior to viewing a creative clutter reel and having

them do it again after exposure to the creative to see if the featured product was chosen

the second time around.

Another well known aspect of Hispanic consumer market research is a positivity bias. It

can be very frustrating to hear that your Hispanic consumers love everything about your

product when sales are, in-fact, dipping. In order to counteract that we generally utilize a

forced choice methodology when comparing the desirability of product features. Simply

asking how much they like a feature on 5 or 10 point scale will yield a lot of “5’s” and

“10’s” in your data without much discrimination among the answers. Branching can also

be used to reduce overly positive answers by first asking if they agree or disagree with

an attribute or statement followed by asking the level of agreement. The issue with both

these methods is that they add length to a survey and thus limit the number of

questions/features one can include per survey but the improved quality of the end-data

makes them well worth considering.

Ultimately we have to trust that consumer research participants are being honest with

their responses (after pulling out straight liners, speeders, etc.) The trick is to determine

when consumers themselves are unaware of their own biases and design questions

that uncover real-world behaviors that consumers themselves may not even be fully

conscious of. So next time you’re asked how often you watch educational or cultural

programming on television, eat healthy or go to the theater ask yourself if your thinking

of your actual self or that ideal you that lives in your imagination.