People aren’t desperately honest creatures. Through no fault of our own we’re victims of the way our brains have evolved; it’s wise not to take the things people claim at face value. Among the many issues affecting market research the quality of respondent recruitment is reasonably frequently debated. It’s not something I got into in Consumer.ology mostly because even when you recruit the “right” people, asking them questions throws up a whole world of other issues. However, over the last couple of days I’ve had a fascinating insight into the recruitment process and can, at no charge to the market research industry, offer them a high quality recruitment tool. I was contacted by a television network who wanted to interview me about a story that has been in the news regularly over the past few weeks; the cost of filling your car with petrol (or diesel). Prices have risen substantially over the past few weeks and since […]
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Fighting the Fat (or Not): Behavioural Insight
With levels of obesity increasing, efforts are being made in several of the countries affected to find a way of getting overweight people to stop cramming high calorie food into their mouths on a regular basis. Diet is a fascinating area, since it’s one in which many people have first hand experience of what I call “the Mind Gap” – the space that exists between the unconscious and conscious mind. In this case it’s experienced when people make firm commitments to lose weight, commitments that they have with complete (conscious) conviction at the time, then find that after an initial period of success their weight returns to its previous level. Sometimes they ascribe their return to greater mass to mystic forces or an underlying medical condition, but more often they realise that they’ve not been sticking to the good intentions they made and, in a distracted moment, have taken it upon themselves to […]
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