Bias in Primary Elections and its Applicability in New Product Research

Doesn’t this lead to inherent and obvious bias? That’s the market researcher side talking. In implementing questionnaires we wouldn’t typically make known the results from previous respondents to those taking the survey later. This would surely have some influence on their answers that we wouldn’t want. We need a clean, pure read (as best as we can with surveys) as to consumer opinions and attitudes. Any deviation from this would surely compromise our data.

But then again, is this always the case? Could there be situations in which some purposely predisposed informational bias is beneficial? I say yes! Granted one needs to be cautious and thoughtful when exposing respondents to prior information, but sometimes in order to get the specific type of response we want, a little bias is helpful. If asking about a particular product or product function, we may provide an example or guide so they can fully understand the product. E.g. 10 GB of storage is good for X number of movies and X number of songs.

But circling back to the notion of letting respondents see the answers from previous respondents, even within the same survey, this could be quite helpful in priming folks to start thinking creatively. If we wish to gather creative ideas from consumers, it’s easy enough to ask them outright to jot something down. But it’s difficult to come up with new and creative ideas on the fly without much help. And responses we get from such tasks validate that point as many are nonsense, or short dull answers. So instead, we could show a respondent several ideas that have come up previously, either internally or from previous respondents, to jumpstart the thinking process and either edit/add onto an existing idea, or be stimulated enough to come up with their own unique idea. And truth is, it works! We at TRC implement this exact new product research technique with great success in our Idea Mill™ solution, and end up with many creative and unique ideas that our client companies use to move forward.

So while the presidential process strikes me as odd since any votes cast in other states following the Iowa Caucus may be inherently biased, there are opportunities where this sort of predisposition to information can work in our favor.