Marketing Research Blog

 In the OJ Simpson Trial, the DNA evidence was so incredibly strong that some pundits suggested that the qustion “Is OJ guilty?” constituted an intelligence test. Though not politically correct, the “yes” or “no” clearly indicated one’s reasoning ability since the likelihood that the DNA came from anyone other than OJ was less than 1 in a billion.

I’ve long used an equally simple way to gauge the IQ of folks who consider themselves to be marketing researchers. Let me explain!

Suppose you have created two versions of an ad designed to increase your brand’s unaided awareness. In a marketing research study, unaided awareness for Ad “A” is found to be 21% and 18% for Ad “B.” But the difference is not statistically significant (p > .05). Assuming that there are no other differences between the two ads and that you must make the decision right now, the question that you should ask the researcher is “Which ad would you recommend be run in the media?”If the so-called “marketing researcher” responds with something like “It doesn’t matter or flip a coin,” I’d humbly suggest that you fire him or her and that you run Ad “A.” That is, go with the higher number. The best information that you have is that Ad “A” performed better on unaided awareness than did Ad “B.” The fact that there was no significance difference only means that the observed 3-point difference could have occurred more than 5 times out of 100–not that no difference was present.

I’ve posed this problem to numerous folks who consider themselves “marketing researchers” including some Ph.D. types. Sadly many of these supposedly learned folks said, “Flip a coin; it makes no difference.” Unfortunately, after statistics 101, they never got their brains out of low gear; clearly they flunked this simple intelligence test.