OPINION12 July 2010
Steve is looking at the small group of people who say silly things in any survey….
Just listening to a creative director friend of mine talking about ethics amoung consumers and mentioning that 9% of them claim they will pay more than 50% extra for ‘ethical’ products.
I am sure some of them would but this number seems very high. It reminded me of the recent poll in Russia which suggested that 8% of Russians thought the country’s football team would win the World Cup, despite them not qualifying for the tournament!
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6603PG20100701
Having seen this small 5-8% of people saying some very strange things across many surveys over the years I think we should just accept that all surveys seem to have 5-8% of people who are effectively laughing at the survey. It reminds me of the great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon:
http://www.stat.psu.edu/old_resources/Cartoons/cartoon014.gif
So what should we do about these folks. In some ways they make the results a bit more interesting but clearly not more correct. So presumably we should have some sort of industry standard to always over recruit and then delete these folks, no idea how to do this but I am sure someone has?!