I’ve just done another one of those interminable YouGov consumer surveys.
The thing about YouGov is they don’t appear to have any quality control over their surveys. The reason why I take part in political surveys is that I’m interested in the result; I have no such stake in a survey about London restaurants or utility bills. Yet all too often, the surveys asked for the latter are insanely complicated and endlessly repetitive, to the point that about halfway in, you start to lose the will to live. More precisely, I have to admit, I simply start making random replies in order to get through as quickly as possible in order to get my 50p. The same applies to those BrandIndex surveys, only more so.
I can’t possibly be the only one. If I were YouGov, or one of the companies that commissions such surveys, I’d be really worried about this: are they really getting reliable data? A bit of quality control I suspect would work wonders. How about it guys?
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It’s bad survey design. More often than not it’s the Research Manager in the client company rather than agency at fault. The Agency researcher will patiently explain to the Toothpaste marketing manager of UniGamble that 50 pages of repetitive inqiury about the brand personality of flouride is unlikely to elicit many completes or honest responses, but they will not be convinced. They will then blame the agency when the data is crap.
I think YouGov should adopt a new policy of sending these out followed by a quickie 2-pager that asks respondents to send comments back to the client about the questionnaire, that’d reduce the problem.
I’d be happy to go along with what you say, were it not for the fact that today’s BrandIndex this morning reminded me of how pisspoor YouGov are at organising their own surveys.