In an interview in today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the German satirist Martin Sonneborn tells of his experience of the world of MR.

Sonneborn did some door-to-door survey work while he was a student, before joining the satirical magazine Titanic, of which he later became editor.

He says his main priority in the job was to put in the minimum possible amount of effort, which meant that if the most positive answers were listed first on the questionnaire, then an overwhelming majority of respondents would end up saying (for example) that having a fridge in their living room was a brilliant idea.

But it wasn’t a complete waste of time – Sonneborn, who now writes for Spiegel Online and can be seen on ZDF’s Heute Show, says the experience taught him some useful lessons. “I know now how surveys can be manipulated and how to evaluate market research,” he says.

Speaking of satirists, Armando Iannucci (the man wholly or partly responsible for On The Hour, The Day Today, Alan Partridge, In The Loop and The Thick Of It) will be one of the keynote speakers at Research 2010 in March. Keep an eye on the Events section of Research-live.com for more details.