Kantar's Profiles Blog

Online surveys have become the cornerstone of the market research industry. They quickly and easily allow businesses to gather consumer data, which they can use to: enrich products, alter marketing campaigns, and tailor messaging. Unfortunately, modern technology, which has improved the ease with which companies can generate surveys and analyze results, has also spawned an era where an increasing number of surveys are poorly formulated, limiting responses or skewing data to misrepresent customer intentions. By applying a few basic tenants of survey design, we easily increase engagement and improve data accuracy and overall quality.

According to a spring 2015 study from Microsoft, the average human attention span has fallen below that of goldfish -- and you can blame it on the gadgets we use to watch YouTube videos and play "Crossy Road." The researchers clocked the average human attention span at just eight seconds in 2013, falling four seconds from the 12-second average in 2000, and putting humans just one second below goldfish. (http://www.cnet.com/news/goldfish-the-actual-fish-not-the-crackers-may-have-a-better-attention-span-than-humans/)

We made the transition from CATI to online, but now we need to make the transition from online to mobile. But, how do we keep survey respondents engaged in a way that captures their attention? Can we carry them past the eight second threshold?

From a questionnaire design perspective, we need to balance the marketing research hat with the respondent hat. Yes, we need to ensure our paired comparison questions are all implemented for proper analysis, but let’s grab the attention of our respondents with some color and images, bringing life to our questions. Let’s be their distraction.  

If you study the art of film making, it will tell you that a good film script is based around one great question. This question captures your attention from the beginning; the story that naturally emerges slowly reveals the answer. The 'question' drives the entire story.

Question:  What if a nun was made to be a nanny?  Movie: The Sound of Music

Question: What if dreams and reality were inter-changeable?  Movie: The Matrix

Question: What if there's more to life than being ridiculously good looking? Movie: Zoolander

A growing percentage of respondents access surveys using their mobile devices, but most surveys are not designed to display legibly on these devices. This leads to frustration, poor data quality, survey dropout, and eventually panel attrition. Lightspeed GMI is taking a proactive approach to survey design to help ensure today’s surveys are compatible across devices. The best way to do this is to design surveys with mobile display in mind, ensuring they will render adequately on the smallest screens. Based on our extensive research on research we have identified 10 guidelines to make a survey device agnostic:

In previous years, I attended Research and Results in Munich as a guest. This year, I was happy to present The Art of Bonsai Survey Design, one of many award winning papers from Jon Puleston, for Lightspeed GMI. The free entrance makes it possible for every market researcher to gain information and industry insights at Research & Results. And, every year it becomes more international, not just the exhibitors -- some lectures were presented in English with the option to wear a headphone and listen in German.