Clients say the darndest things

For the past couple of weeks I have been mulling Stan Sthanunathan's remark at the IIR conference in Las Vegas reported as "quality doesn't matter."  I've also been getting reactions from friends and colleagues around the industry.  They vary from "I'm glad we don't work for Coke" to "How should this impact our strategy" with a midpoint of "He's just trying to make a point." 

I'm not going to reprise his entire argument here. That's why there's a hyperlink in the first sentence.  But it's worth a read because it seems to me to raise an interesting question, one that I have asked here before.  Do we really understand what level of precision clients need for the business decisions they make? There is this tendency for researchers to believe that when a client commissions a piece of research the results of that research and that research only drives a business decision. And so it needs to be spot on in terms of measurement accuracy or you get a bad decision.   But when you talk to clients they often tell you that they look at a whole range of data points as part of their decision making process and that one study we did for them is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

There is, of course, at least one other explanation.  That would be that clients expect us to deliver accurate results.  Those are table stakes.  We differentiate ourselves through interpretation, not measurement.  Either way, these are tough lessons for a survey geek. 

Comments

[Theo Downes-Le Guin]

I found this sound bite less bothersome - because of its clear rhetorical quality - than the keynote speaker at The MR Event who opined "Don't let science limit creativity." To be fair, in context the comment was aimed at encouraging the industry to offer more directive results and not spend 40 minutes on the methods page, so to speak. But intentionally or not, I think the speaker captured an insidious current in our industry. In what universe have science and creativity ever been opposed (tell that to Salk or Dyson)? How is it helpful to an industry that has more kinship to phrenology than physics to imply that in order to be creative and effective we must abandon whatever modest scientific pretenses we ever made?