If you are a market researcher, you have heard this quote at least more than once: "Garbage in, garbage out."
Basically it means the results from your research is only as good as the way you set up and deploy your project. There's a lot of items that can turn a project into something shitty: Bad survey writing, writing biased questions, overcomplicated survey questions, poor respondent sample , bad survey tool, wrong way to reach ideal survey population, poor analytics, and more.
Maybe it's too soon to talk about politics as everyone seems to be politically burnt out. But I am going to do it anyways. Specifically about the presidential race.
Let's face it, Mitt Romney is super rich and he had some of the richest people around the world donate to his campaign, and yet the dude lost. He hired some of the brightest and smartest people to run his campaign and yet they failed to capitalize on all of the funding he was able to give them and deliver him the president's seat. I have been reading some really interesting articles online stating that Romney's campaign were not using unbiased polls and research to determine his political strategy. In fact, the polls that were spot on and proved true the day of the election were completely ignored or balked at in favor of their own in-house research. It's clear to me that all of this in-house research offered his strategy team a slanted view of their odds. Too many "yes" men do not and will not yield positive results.
As a person who works in market research I see this all too many times. My clients are not happy with the results or the response rates. They find a way to point fingers at others while not admitting that they may have not set up a good research project and deployment plan in the first place. They sell these incredibly elaborate research projects for more money, but then have trouble finding the right tools to accomplish them.
COMPLICATED QUESTIONS IN A SURVEY DO NOT EQUAL BETTER RESEARCH RESULTS!!!
Research people need to go back to simplifying the way the collect data, make it enticing for people to give opinions, find those who are passionate and invested enough to share results, use social media to track true opinions via #hashtags, and use unbiased techniques and respondent populations that gather "real picture" results. They also need to know that the simplest questions often yield the best results for board members or CEOS to review.
In addition, I also read that most board members and strategist already have a pretty good hunch of what they want to do anyways so the best thing to do is deliver data that is easy and to the point. They hardly ever read a 40 page research paper. Ever!
Sure, there are other reasons why Romney lost, and I am not supporter of his politics. However, I kind of shudder and also wonder what life would be like today had Romney's team looked at real unbiased results. Would Obama not be a 2-term president? We'll never know, but as a market researcher one has to imagine what could have been....
