How Much is Too Much?

In market research, we are always striving to provide our clients with relevant and pertinent information and insights. This can unfortunately bleed into how we end up treating our respondents. Sometimes we can forget that we have a working partnership with respondents, especially in communities, and without them, our communities wouldn’t have any people to draw insights from.

We’ve all worked in the market research field with clients who want more, more, more from their studies. This can mean a 80+ question survey or an 8 hour intense focus group if they had their way, but we realistically know that as length goes up, completes and participation will go down. The next solution clients find, is to have fewer questions, but they simply add more options to each question. This can also be a problem in itself.

While Barry Schwartz and his jam experiment might not be replicable, I do still think that principle extends itself to survey questions. A client recently came to us asking for a way to identify 25+ different concepts against each other, and they originally wanted to see if they could all be evaluated against one another. Let’s say they were all vegetables; imagine trying to evaluate your favorite one out of 25 different choices! You could like cucumbers for their sweetness, tomatoes for how juicy they are, or beets for their strong earthy flavor. How can you fairly evaluate these against each other?

In the client’s eyes, their products can be judged against one another, but we know that respondents need real choice rather than a lot of choices. We need to narrow them down to categories that are more easily compared.

We need to help out our respondents, and in doing so we can help out our clients with the insights that they really want. While we aren’t a grocery store that isn’t affected by the paradox of choice, in doing research, we do run into ‘just too much’. It’s our responsibility to put respondents into a situation where they can make meaningful choices that actually reflect what they are thinking, and not one they make just because it seems like an okay response.