Be Careful What You Ask Your Customers
There is no doubt that understanding the needs and wants of customers in an ever-more competitive economic environment is critical. Major enterprises spend millions of dollars a year on painstaking market research and consumer surveys. Every year, thousands of shoppers are buttonholed as they enter stores or call customer service centers and then are quizzed about their shopping experience. But a study by Stanford Graduate School of Business indicates that marketers greatly exaggerate the value of matching presumed preferences of consumers and giving them what they want. The study has demonstrated that information gleaned from some widely used types of customer surveys can be misleading and even counterproductive.
The research strongly indicates that priming consumers to anticipate an upcoming interview leads to unexpected, and generally negative, results. The more shoppers were asked in advance, the more negative they became. Most negative of all were the consumers who knew they would be quizzed.
Some popular survey methods actually put consumers in a negative frame of mind, hardly the results the companies paying for the survey had envisioned. The mere fact that consumers are told in advance to form evaluations leads them to believe that they are expected to focus on negative aspects, and they act on that assumption. It marks a distinct departure from prior work that concluded polling consumers just prior to shopping or encouraging buyers to compare products on the shelves was likely to be more accurate.
Most consumers want to be honest, and even helpful, when they participate in a survey. But too many consumers, helpful means being (constructively) critical or at least offering suggestions for improvement, as opposed to simply stating their opinions—good or bad. Moreover, taking a survey and giving a thoughtful answer to complex questions about why they behaved in a certain way isn't easy. Most consumers don't have real insight into their own motivations. Consumers who decide on their own to compare products take decisions, as you might expect, subconsciously without rationalizing their choices, the way they do in research.
Telling consumers to make comparisons, which is a practice that marketers use a lot, can be very uncertain because it can change the behavior of consumers in very fundamental ways. The mere fact that they are asked to make a comparison causes them to become unusually cautious.
