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Kevin K

The Next Time Someone Says Surveys Don’t Work, Show Them This

[From the desk of Kevin Karty]


I wish I listened to my own research! I'd be closer to retirement. 😉 


If you've taken Econ 101, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis says that you can't beat the market with so much data. If so, why would a a small (N=400) survey offer any incremental value to an industry awash in trillions of data points every day?


Except, it does. And the correlation is pretty good...


Now this wasn't a "standard" survey, but it wasn't hard to build. The survey below is from a "gut response" swipe question that uses imagery, words, and rapid response to get peoples' thoughts without overthinking. We just calculated the gap between people swiping that they would increase or decrease spend in each category.


For the stock data, I googled for the most representative publicly traded company in the category. Not a fancy methodology.


Check out the top 3 and bottom 3 categories.


It's data like this that gives me faith in the value of consumer research. And it also makes me highly skeptical that backward-looking Simulated Respondents will replace real ones any time soon!


So, what do you think? Did the data just get lucky here?

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