Market research has gone right downhill. The first time I did it, which was a couple of years ago now, I got given a £10 HMV voucher for spending about 5 minutes saying I didn’t much like Coca-Cola Jeans. On friday, I got given a pen for spending half an hour answering very, very tedious questions about car adverts. It’s not even a particularly nice pen; it doesn’t glow in the dark or anything.
The survey was flawed in a number of way: First, it asked me to list “all the car manufacturers I could think of”. Which meant we were going to be there for a while. And then it asked me to list “all the car models I could think of”. Um. How long was this supposed to take me, again? I think it was supposed to be measuring the influence of press and TV advertising on people’s ability to remember car models, which means that my listing of things like “Jaguar E-type”, “Ferrari 355” and “Lambourghini Murcialago” is likely to skew things slightly.
Finally, they asked if I remembered seeing advertising for a selection of different manufacturers recently. One of the manufacturers listed was Rover, and funnily enough, no, I hadn’t seen any advertising from them recently. Can’t imagine why, though.
However, there was a very cute goth/punk chick doing the same survey whilst I was there, so that made it all worthwhile.