5.5 Audience Research

The success of the Barbenheimer duo of movies in 2023 was fascinating, but it’s just as illuminating to look at movies that do very badly at the box office. In 2002, Castle Rock Entertainment released a science fiction comedy called The Adventures of Pluto Nash, with a production budget of $100 million and starring Eddie Murphy, Rosario Dawson, and other big actors. The critics were savage, audiences were uninterested, and the movie netted a worldwide total of only $7.1 million, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs in history.

It’s not just movies that fail in the marketplace, of course:

• In April, 1985, Coca Cola announced that it was changing the flavor of its signature drink, calling it “New Coke.” The public hated it and demanded a return to the old flavor, which Coca Cola did three months later.
• In 2007, Microsoft came out with an mp3 player called Zune, which only lasted four years before being discontinued.
• In 2014, Google introduced a wearable computer called Google Glass, which never took off, and the product was abandoned in 2023.
• in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was transforming Facebook into Meta Platforms, and Meta’s Reality Labs division invested $45 billion in developing the virtual reality “Metaverse.” The public was uninterested, and Zuckerberg’s net worth fell by $100 billion in 2022.

Not all new ideas work, of course, and sometimes the reasons for failure are unforeseeable. Still, companies hate losing large sums of money, so naturally they would all like to know what the public is going to think of a new product before it flames out in the marketplace. One thing you could say about all these failures is that “nobody wanted that” (even if a CEO or investor thought it was a great idea). This is what led to the creation of the market research industry, and ways to measure what the public does want before it’s too late.

What are the most common market research techniques?

• Informal research: Ask around, among friends and acquaintances, or, if you know any, shopkeepers and people who can observe the public’s buying habits. This has the advantage of being free, but the disadvantage of being unreliable. One thing that many failed contestants on American Idol had in common was that they said “All my friends told me I was a great singer and would become the next American Idol!” Maybe your friends are just being nice, or aren’t representative of the general public. Likewise if your friends tell you your invention or business idea is going to make you a millionaire, don’t bank on it until you’ve done more research.
• Surveys: The best way to find out what the general public thinks of anything is to do a large-scale survey, but, as discussed in Chapter 2, this is harder than it looks. Online surveys are cheap and easy, but the representativeness question is an enormous challenge: where will you post the survey, and how do you know that the people who respond are typical of the population? This is particularly challenging with online surveys because of the self-selection issue: if you count on people to choose to take the survey, you lose control of knowing what their motives are. Yes, there are ways to guarantee demographic diversity, but as the “Levels of Information” section was intended to prove, demographics are not everything. This is why political polling still relies heavily on phone surveys: because the pollster, not the recipient, is deciding who the respondents will be. Still, there can be issues with who takes the call and who doesn’t, and phone surveys are labor-intensive and therefore expensive. Another disadvantage of surveys is that it may not be easy to have the recipients experience the thing you want feedback about. It’s easy to ask them what they think of well-known presidential candidates; it’s harder to figure out how they can taste your new popcorn flavors.
• Focus groups: As mentioned in Chapter 2, this is a way to gather more in-depth information from a small sample of people, and is especially useful when you want people to be able to bounce ideas off of each other. Producers of movies, television shows, and commercials gather small groups, have them watch the video in question or sample the product, and then pick their brains for their reactions. Because these groups are expensive to run, most sources can’t afford to do more than a few, so it’s wise to remember that just because several dozen people liked your political ad or popcorn flavor, you can’t be sure the same will be true of the general public.
• Rebates and special offers. When you see an offer for a “freebie” of any kind, it is worth stopping to ask “If they want to give me something for free, what are they getting out of it?” Often, it’s information: to receive that offer or rebate, you typically need to provide details about yourself, which can be valuable market research data. This has led to the observation that “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer: you are the product being sold.” If you don’t like the sound of that, perhaps you shouldn’t accept free offers.

Recently, large-scale data mining has replaced a lot of these techniques, but since it does not involve directly communicating with audience members, it’s beyond the scope of this book. It also has some of the disadvantages mentioned already: you can only mine data about things that people are already doing, not potential things that they might like or would consider, and while large-scale information is excellent at showing trends it’s not as good at providing understanding.