RESPONDENT COOPERATION: PAST, FUTURE AND PRESENT

By Harry Heller, CMOR Director of Respondent Cooperation

The Past

It is 1968. The interviewer walked up the path through the neatly trimmed garden and rang the bell of the house. In a few seconds the homeowner, a woman in a housecoat and apron, answered the door.

The visitor spoke to the homemaker, “Hello. I’m Mary Johnson from Sarah Salisbury Marketing Research. We are doing a survey in this area on the subject of home sewing. I’d like to interview you for about one hour on this subject.”

“Come right in,” said the homemaker. As the interviewer set out her questionnaire and cards the homemaker said, “Is it all right if I make a pot of coffee?”

The interview went on for an hour and a half. There was no accounting for the fact that when the interview reviewed the dresses made with sewing kits by the homemaker, the homemaker would go up to her bedroom and bring some down to show the interviewer.

When the interviewer left the house, the homemaker gave her a hug and a kiss and thanked her for the interesting experience.

Is this a fictional scenario?

Actually it is an accurate description of marketing research the way it was conducted in the 1960’s. Cooperation rates were in the range of 70% to 80%. The interviewers were people who lived or telephoned from nearby, the products they interviewed about were known by everyone: Jell-O, Simplicity Patterns, Tide, Alka-Seltzer etc. The household heads were home in the daytime and sought interesting breaks in their day, soap operas, card games, interviews, etc.

There were no interviews about banks and financial institutions, hotel stays, airline flights, and other service industries. They hadn’t yet become a factor in marketing research.

Now let’s skip to the 1980’s, 1990’s and early 2000’s.

The same interviewer described above sat in the gleaming modern office, her desk one among 100, two-thirds of them filled. A telephone number popped up on the screen and it was quickly dialed.

“Hello. I’m Mary Johnson from SSMR, Ltd. We are doing a survey and you have been selected…”

The hang-up resounded in her earpiece.

More numbers popped up on the screen resulting in more hang-ups. A few people did tell her that they are not interested in buying anything. One person said she was just interviewed by the hotel she stayed at last week and didn’t have any time for another interview. Several were answered by a teen and a spouse saying the Female Head was at work and wouldn’t be home until 9PM.

When the interviewer finally reached a qualified person, there was a tired sound in her voice. The interview was difficult because the respondent didn’t completely understand Mary’s Midwestern “twang.” They went through the interview but both Mary and the respondent looked forward to the end of the interview. Mary thought back to her early days as an interviewer when she was welcomed in the respondent’s home.

So is it any wonder that between the 1970’s and the new millennium cooperation rates are lower? The interviewer and respondent no longer live in close proximity, there is much competition for the respondents time – including her job, other surveys and sales calls, the products that she is being interviewed about are no longer her “friends” (as such brands as AT&T, TWA, Plymouth, and Schlitz have been relegated to the history books of marketing) and new brands have emerged that people can’t even keep up with – Internet brands, brands from Europe and Asia, brands that have numbers and initials, and many products made by conglomerates or generic store brands that are less expensive. It seems we’ll never get respondents to cooperate.

The Future

If all seems hopeless, take heed. I firmly believe that if we make the right moves now respondents will come back to us and actually will want to be interviewed. History runs in cycles. Let’s take coffee as an example – and we may be able to learn from it.

In the 1970’s coffee consumption was declining precipitously. Coffee drinkers were a shrinking group and young people were drinking other beverages besides coffee. And what happened? Along came Howard Shultz of Starbucks. He had a unique idea: Let’s make coffee drinking an occasion. As one consultant pointed out to me, “When you buy coffee in Starbucks, you don’t just buy the coffee you rent the table.” Take those negative signs about coffee out to 2005 and now you see people walking in the streets with giant cups of java. The experience is the thing. Now, from espresso roast to Hazelnut Decaf, coffee has become big.

Our public is changing too, as it always is. We went through a period when the public wanted to draw their shades and shut themselves out from telephone calls. Who could blame them? Between 6PM and 9PM, life was a zoo! They were preparing dinner, hoping for family conversation while being interrupted by 5 to 10 calls from people trying to sell them something. Who would want to cooperate? But now, the Do-Not-Call Law has limited sales calls. And the public is changing. It now consists of the kids who, 10 years ago, learned to Instant Message to each other, who use their cell phones for communication at concerts, who play video games at high speeds. They seek stimuli and experiences. They love to buy things and have strong opinions about the products available to them. So my challenge to the industry is how can we make surveys an experience? How can we encourage the new generation of respondents to want to take a survey?

I’m seeking your input on what we can do to form a group that will ideate the issue of Making Respondents Want To be Interviewed. Please let me know at my email below what you think of this idea.

Back to the Present

But meanwhile we have to deal with the respondents we have now. All of the studies CMOR has conducted suggest that we can increase respondent cooperation by significant increments in two ways:

1. Training our Interviewers to handle the critical minute or so when they are soliciting cooperation.

1. Updating our knowledge of the myriad of studies that have already been done that can increase cooperation in all forms of interviewing modes and all types of respondents.

At the Respondent Cooperation Workshop, September 7 th - 9 th in Washing-ton D.C. we will be covering these two areas:

1. Training our Interviewers:

We will be introducing three new training modules. This is an opportunity for each company to train the trainers of your interviewers.

• Refusal Rebuttals
• Voice Control
• Supervisors and Communication Styles

1. Updating our knowledge of how to increase cooperation rates.

We will hear from:

• A panel covering how to increase cooperation among minorities.
• Speakers giving their experience in how to increase cooperation in polling, on-line, telephone, etc.
• Sharing, networking and discussions about latest cooperation practices.
• New techniques in training supervisors.
• How to make our profession more visible to the public, a review of the Industry Identifier and our PR program.
• The challenges of sampling portability.
• A summary of the major studies CMOR has presented that increase cooperation.

To find out more about this conference and to register just click on this link:

http://www.cmor.org/RC_Reg_Form_05.pdf

Or tell me your ideas: hheller@cmor.org

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Ms. Parnes focused on the FTC’s pre-existing authority to punish spyware installers under its anti-fraud and deceptive practices authority. Mr. Cavicke, whose staff CMOR has worked extensively with, described the challenges of defining, implementing and regulating an effective spyware bill.

These speeches were followed by four panels, detailing various types of responses to the spyware problem: legislative, technological, consumer education, and industry. These titles were meant to emphasize the notion that it’s not just the law that matters, but also the reaction in the marketplace. More specifically, it was a chance to discuss how anti-spyware software companies define and treat spyware, the potential for collateral damage on measurement applications such as cookies and panel software and finally, whether the consumer understands these programs.

Some panelists stressed the need for the industry to educate the consumer about which programs are “good” (i.e., legitimate measurement, survey and advertising research programs that ask for Personally Identifiable Information [PII], with a valid privacy policy and a promise not to sell the information), and which are “bad” (such as spyware programs that steal such PII).

CMOR can play an important role in all four of these areas. Legislatively, of course, we have worked (and will continue to work) for the most effective and most protective bill from the survey research perspective.

But beyond that, we’ve networked effectively in a far broader context. Because of our co-sponsorship of the Spyware Forum, we’re familiar with several important players at the software solution level and they understand CMOR’s Government Affairs and Respondent Cooperation activities. We now know how to get in touch with these companies and who to speak with regarding any relevant questions or concerns.

Thanks to CMOR’s Respondent Cooperation division, we are well placed to work with other groups on how to best educate Americans as to which programs they can trust and which ones should be avoided. Such activities could go a long way toward protecting the survey and advertising research programs that so many of our members rely on.

The ultimate outcome of the Spyware Forum is that our ability to confront the many aspects of spyware has greatly improved, due to the vast industry and governmental networking in which we are engaged.

The survey and marketing research profession still faces many challenges with this bill, but because of CMOR’s multifaceted connections on the issue, we’re well positioned to face those challenges.

We would like to acknowledge the extensive contributions made on the spyware topic by two of our Government Affairs Committee members—Nick Nyhan of Dynamic Logic, and Bill MacElroy of Socratic Technologies.

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