Marketing Research Blog

Sorry folks–it won’t just be the “fat cats” who will get their taxes increased. Every one who pays income tax now will get their tax increased. But how could that be? One candidate and all of his surrogates keep telling that 95% of the people will get a tax decrease.How could those people get their taxes increased–or at least those people who now actually pay some income tax?

The explanation is quite simple. It’s much the same as Clinton’s “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” In this case, it means that rescinding Bush’s tax cuts (or letting them expire)  doesn’t count as a tax increase even though every single person that pay taxes will end up paying more taxes.But the net result is that everyone will get an increase in their income taxes, not just the ‘fat cat’ who, incidentally, are the very ones who create jobs. Sadly, this will result in fewer jobs available and less jobs created.When you vote on November 4th for the next President of the United States (POTUS), think about whether the so-called “tax decrease for 95% of the people” will result in more jobs for the 95% or fewer jobs.

It’s sad! Political pollsters are giving marketing researchers a bad name. Umpteen pollsters are asking potential voters the same question but getting very different results. Who is right and who is wrong?

If these folks are so good at doing what they do, why is it that the results are so inconsistent. Were 4 different marketing research companies hired by General Motors to ask consumers the same questions but get very different results, General Motors would fire them all and hire a competent researcher and conduct their own surveys.

Getting consist results is not difficult. One only needs to select a sample of consumers or potential voters that constitutes a representative sample of the population of interest (whether it be likely automobile buyers or likely voters) and then to simply ask them unbiased questions.

In the humble opinion of this marketing researcher, it is appalling that we’re witnessing such diverse results–a diversity that is due largely to incompetence, greed, or political bias. It does not have to be that way.

As we are getting so close to the presidential election, it is time to mention margin-of-error once again. Just yesterday, I heard one of the radio personalities on Chicago 890 AM—WLS comment that many people didn’t understand the concept of margin-of-error. And that’s true.

Then he proceeded to explain what it meant. In doing so, though, he got it just half right. The radio personality gave a hypothetical example that 50% of voters were likely to vote for one of the candidates–with a margin-or-error of plus or minus 5 percentage points. He described that his statement meant that the “real percentage” was in the range of 45-55%–which is correct. But he failed to indicate how likely it was that is the “true score” fell in the 45% to 55% range. If nothing else was stated, the confidence limit (the degree of certainty the “true value” was in the range was 95 %.).  Furthermore, because of the size of the range + or - 5%, it tells us that the sample size was considerably less than 1100.  It is much more frequent that we see margins-of-error of + or - 3%, as the radio personality’s colleague had indicated. When the statement is made that 50% preferred one candidate–with a margin or error of 3% (+ or - ) 3%, this will always mean that one can be confident that 95% of the time when such a survey is undertaken the actual score will be within + or - 3% of the observed score (which in this case would have been 50%). This would also imply that the research had used a sample of approximately 1100 individuals–hopefully individual that were representative of the population under study–such as “likely voters.”