Giving Marketing a Bad Name
Last week I received an email from a manufacturer of car racks. (I had purchased one of their products last year.) The email invited me to participate in a customer survey. I figured, “Hey, why not?” So I clicked on the link and started the survey. What an embarrassment!
The survey was devoted to a prospective redesign of their product. Nothing substantial was proposed in the redesign, just color and logo changes. But the questions read like a parody of bad marketing.
Douglas Adams, in his book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, maroons a space ship full of time-traveling marketers on prehistoric Earth. This bumbling crew sits around a campfire trying to re-invent the wheel. After a number of unsuccessful attempts, one marketer blurts out, “”Well, if you think it’s so @%$@^$ easy, what color do you think it should be?”
Unfortunately, the marketing survey I was invited to participate in seemed to be designed by the same crew of inept marketers. The survey was full of questions about my attitude toward different prospective colors of car racks. But the questions were solely directed toward my emotional response to the colors. I kept thinking that black (their standard color) was good because it coordinated with almost any car color. On the other hand, their proposed colors were less satisfactory because they would clash with my current car and with most any car I was likely ever to buy. But apparently the marketer who designed the survey didn’t care about such opinions. There were no choices in this multiple-choice test to communicate opinions like, “What I want most is a rack whose color won’t clash with my car! Black works just fine, thank you!”
There were similar questions about prospective new versions of the company logo. There were questions about changing the color of the graphics, placement of the graphics and the graphic style.
But there was no place on the questionnaire to say what I wanted to say: “I like black. It goes with anything. I don’t care about your logo. We’re not talking designer clothing here. What I want is a nice strong rack that’s not too ugly at a fair price.” I had to put my comments in the “Other” category, where I’m sure they won’t get tallied in any meaningful fashion.
What does this say about marketing survey techniques?
First, we need to be careful to address the issues that are most important to a product’s success — not irrelevant fluff. Emotional responses to colors may be meaningful to some product categories, but probably not car racks. People are going to buy car racks for pragmatic reasons: they carry the stuff that needs to be carried; they are sturdy enough to hold the necessary items safely; they are easy to load and unload; they don’t damage the car; they should look utilitarian but not unduly ugly.
Second, if we truly want customer feedback (as opposed to a contrived justification of our preconceived marketing ideas), we need to be very careful about questionnaire design. Questions should not “lead the witness” or artificially restrict the range of possible answers.
And third, this experience tells me that there are so-called marketers out there who give the rest of us a bad name. Whoever designed this company’s survey pulled the wool over someone’s eyes. They were probably paid a lot of money to get answers to questions that didn’t need answers, and they ignored urgent questions that did need answers.
Let’s try to demonstrate better value for our clients, shall we?