The day after the US Presidential election, we quickly wrote and posted about the market research industry’s failure to accurately predict the election.  Since this has been our widest-read post (by a factor of about 10!) we thought a follow-up was in order.

Some of what we predicted has come to pass. Pollsters are being defensive, claiming their polls really weren’t that far off, and are not reaching very deep to try to understand the core of why their predictions were poor. The industry has had a couple of confabs, where the major players have denied a problem exists.

We are at a watershed moment for our industry. Response rates continue to plummet, clients are losing confidence in the data we provide, and we are swimming in so much data our insights are often not able to find space to breathe. And the public has lost confidence in what we do.

Sometimes it is everyday conversations that can enlighten a problem. Recently, I was staying at an AirBnB in Florida. The host (Dan) was an ardent Trump supporter and at one point he asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was a market researcher the conversation quickly turned to why the polls failed to accurately predict the winner of the election. By talking with Dan I quickly I realized the implications of Election 2016 polling to our industry. He felt that we can now safely ignore all polls – on issues, approval ratings, voter preferences, etc.

I found myself getting defensive. After all, the polls weren’t off that much.  In fact, they were actually off by more in 2012 than in 2016 – the problem being that this time the polling errors resulted in an incorrect prediction. Surely we can still trust polls to give a good sense of what our citizenry thinks about the issues of the day, right?

Not according to Dan. He didn’t feel our political leaders should pay attention to the polls at all because they can’t be trusted.

I’ve even seen a new term for this bandied about:  poll denialism. It is a refusal to believe any poll results because of their past failures. Just the fact that this has been named should be scary enough for researchers.

This is unnerving not just to the market research industry, but to our democracy in general.  It is rarely stated overtly, but poll results are a key way political leaders keep in touch with the needs of the public, and they shape public policy a lot more than many think. Ignoring them is ignoring public opinion.

Market research remains closely associated with political polling. While I don’t think clients have become as mistrustful about their market research as the public has become about polling, clients likely have their doubts. Much of what we do as market researchers is much more complicated than election polling. If we can’t successfully predict who will be President, why would a client believe our market forecasts?

We are at a defining moment for our industry – a time when clients and suppliers will realize this is an industry that has gone adrift and needs a righting of the course. So what can we do to make research great again?  We have a few ideas.

1. First and foremost, if you are a client, make greater demands for data quality. Nothing will stimulate the research industry more to fix itself than market forces – if clients stop paying for low quality data and information, suppliers will react.
2. Slow down! There is a famous saying about all projects.  They have three elements that clients want:  a) fast, b) good, and c) cheap, and on any project you can choose two of these.  In my nearly three decades in this industry I have seen this dynamic change considerably. These days, “fast” is almost always trumping the other two factors.  “Good” has been pushed aside.  “Cheap” has always been important, but to be honest budget considerations don’t seem to be the main issue (MR spending continues to grow slowly). Clients are insisting that studies are conducted at a breakneck pace and data quality is suffering badly.
3. Insist that suppliers defend their methodologies. I’ve worked for corporate clients, but also many academic researchers. I have found that a key difference between them becomes apparent during results presentations. Corporate clients are impatient and want us to go as quickly as possible over the methodology section and get right into the results.  Academics are the opposite. They dwell on the methodology and I have noticed if you can get an academic comfortable with your methods it is rare that they will doubt your findings. Corporate researchers need to understand the importance of a sound methodology and care more about it.
4. Be honest about the limitations of your methodology. We often like to say that everything you were ever taught about statistics assumed a random sample and we haven’t seen a study in at least 20 years that can credibly claim to have one.  That doesn’t mean a study without a random sample isn’t valuable, it just means that we have to think through the biases and errors it could contain and how that can be relevant to the results we present. I think every research report should have a page after the methodology summary that lists off the study’s limitations and potential implications to the conclusions we draw.
5. Stop treating respondents so poorly. I believe this is a direct consequence of the movement from telephone to online data collection. Back in the heyday of telephone research, if you fielded a survey that was too long or was challenging for respondents to answer, it wasn’t long until you heard from your interviewers just how bad your questionnaire was. In an online world, this feedback never gets back to the questionnaire author – and we subsequently beat up our respondents pretty badly.  I have been involved in at least 2,000 studies and about 1 million respondents.  If each study averages 15 minutes that implies that people have spent about 28 and a half years filling out my surveys.  It is easy to lose respect for that – but let’s not forget the tremendous amount of time people spend on our surveys. In the end, this is a large threat to the research industry, as if people won’t respond, we have nothing to sell.
6. Stop using technology for technology’s sake. Technology has greatly changed our business. But, it doesn’t supplant the basics of what we do or allow us to ignore the laws of statistics.  We still need to reach a representative sample of people, ask them intelligent questions, and interpret what it means for our clients.  Tech has made this much easier and much harder at the same time.  We often seem to do things because we can and not because we should.

The ultimate way to combat “poll denialism” in a “post-truth” world is to do better work, make better predictions, and deliver insightful interpretations. That is what we all strive to do, and it is more important than ever.