Seven words you can't say in Market Research

I'm sure you know the seven words you can't say on television, but what about the seven you can't say in a Market Research company: "We know our surveys include professional respondents."

Tom Anderson makes a good point about the impact of professional survey takers  on panel sample prices and the possibility that without them there would be no one left to complete long surveys.

Many have tried to solve this problem. Peanut Labs spent the better part of 2008 hyping up their Optimus technology. I applaud their energy, but they've wasted it on building a complicated solution for the wrong problem. We can't win the war against professional survey takers, and I'm not sure we want to.

As long as there is a financial incentive, the bad guys will find a way to get around our defenses. They get in, we build a bigger fence, they figure out a new way to break through it, rinse, repeat. It's a virtual arms race with no end; just like the spammers and the anti spammers; just like the virus writers and the anti virus people.

Even if we could get rid of professional respondents, we'd be jumping out of the pot and into the fire.

Before we get to the real solution, let's define the real problem. Our surveys are so long, boring, and ugly, that the only way we can get people to participate is to bribe them.

The endgame is simple. Forget about professional respondents. Abolish long, stale, nausea inducing surveys. Replace them with quick, fun, engaging and user friendly data collection technologies that real people will be delighted to use without an incentive. If we fix the survey problem, the professional respondent problem will take care of itself.