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This is not just happening in the larger DIY world. More and more surveys are appearing with major brand sponsorship that have obviously been nowhere near a professional market researcher. Managers can simply conceive of the need for a survey, order it done by an underling with some PC or HTML skills, and voila, a survey appears.
All is not well, however, in DIY land. A surprising number of these grassroots surveys are obviously amateur efforts, full of poorly-worded, confusing questions, questions that are really two or three questions combined so the respondent does not understand what is really being asked, unbalanced ratings scales, nonsensical answer categories and overall general weirdness.
What to do?
In the old days, if anyone in the corporation did venture out on their own to do market research, the senior leader in our silo would confab with the senior leader of the offending silo and orders would be issued to cease and desist. Or not. But everything had to go silo to silo.
Now, surveys can be fielded in real-time, over and done in a matter of hours or days. Oops! Well, we already did it. As the saying goes, better to beg forgiveness
than to ask permission.
Fighting this trend feels a little like playing Sisyphus.
Perhaps a different approach might be more productive.
More to follow.
Comments welcome.
Dr. Bob
