I feel like a chicken!

As an advertising guy, I am usually not permitted to participate in market research - it’s very frequently an exclusion criterion - and, unlike normal people, I feel frustrated about this, because I WANT to participate. Because I want to know what it feels like, the things we impose on our consumers.

Therefore, when presented with the opportunity to participate (or, sometimes, when presented with the possibility to lie when asked whether I work in marketing or advertising), I take it. And so I did yesterday evening, when I was called by phone (whoever comes up with the idea of polling people on a Sunday evening, I shall never know!).

It was (again) a useful experience, because I was (again) confronted with the very bad feeling one gets when answering these questions. First of all, the mention of the eternal “only five or ten minutes”, that invariably turn out to be around twenty minutes. Second, being confronted with someone who doesn’t even tries to create the illusion of a normal conversation, but instead rambles through a precoded questionnaire from which every deviation is untolerable. Like in the following, rather absurd, exchange:

“are you a member of any type of leisure or professional club in your town?”

“no.”

“So, are you a member of a sports club?”

“no. I’m not a member of any club!”

“So, are you a member of a professional club?”

“No. As I said, I’m not a member of any club!”

“So, are you a member of a political club?”

“AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!. Which part of the word “none” don’t you understand?”

The survey turned out to be about a free door-to-door magazine that, indeed, we receive and, indeed, I sometimes flip through. I think I spend around 10 minutes with it every month, and that says a lot about both my appreciation (“good”) as my involvement (“very low”) with the magazine. However, I was asked questions about its contents (”good, I guess”), its journalistic style (”uhm?”) and its lay-out (”never really paid attention, I must say”). All of which took me the better part of half an hour, around three times the time I spend with the actual magazine.

What does this mean, and why does it make me feel like a chicken in a battery? Because I could never get out of my (answer) box for the whole interview, because I was forced to lay an egg even if there was none ready and because the person trying to get me to lay my egg, couldn’t be bothered whether I liked it or was even remotely interested. To drive the point home: I was forced, by the format of the survey, to have an opinion I normally don’t have an opinion about. Which means that the survey cannot by definition capture my true opinion: that I’m rather indifferent, that the magazine never makes any ripples on the surface, etc.

Therefore, most of all, there’s another analogy which is worth mentioning. The opinions I so easily gave away yesterday are very much like an egg by a chicken-in-a-battery: it may seem like an opinion, it may look like an opinion, but it’s really just a lot of wind packed in an attractive packaging. And the advertising or marketing decisions based on these opinions, could be just as healthy in the long term, as a diet based on these kind of eggs …