BBC Documentary

Market Research, The Inside Story

The documentary showed that survey research applies the rigorous science of mathematics to human behavior, but they are not meant to be predictive, they can only reflect the state of the public opinion at the moment they were conducted. People can change their mind in less than 24 hours, or even in the last minute.

An important point is that in a research, what matters is not the number of individuals in the sample, although it does help to have more than fewer, what matters is the system by which they have been selected. Experienced interviewers can speed things up but being selective about whom he/she approaches

There are ways to assess the validity of the survey results.

Sample design: how was the sample drawn up?

Sample size: how big is the sample?

Refusal rates

Questions design: what were the questions asked

Neutral wording

But surveys are not the only method in market research, there are also interviews that may help to understand people in a better way.

In some cases, instead of age, sex and class, you could use variables such as the products people buy or where they go on holidays.

Another method is a process known as accompanied shopping. The limitation of this is that you wont know if people have the same emotions with a researcher standing next to them, as when theyre shopping on their own.

Other technologic ways, includes panels. Some households have this device called shopping barcode reader and also theres the people-meter system.

At the end, the documentary talks about a new technique harnessing the latent power of market researchers existing databases, it is called data fusion, seen as the cutting edge of market research. People could be fused for many surveys to create a set of virtual consumers, invented people who exist only in computers but whose life are described with incredible details (what they watch on TV, what newspaper they read, their hobbies, politics, their grocery shopping).