Anderson Analytics Launches Optimist(TM)
Tired of poor survey results due to questionable panel quality? Afraid to conduct market research only to have customers poo-poo managements perfectly good ideas?
Several panel companies like MarketTools and PeanutLabs have launched products to help detect panel fraud and understand who is taking your surveys. Other companies like BrainJuicer have created panels made up only of opinion leaders or really creative customers. Others yet have specialized in various hard to find demographic areas from youth to gay/lesbian survey takers.
The problem, until now, was that there has not been any good source for the most important type of panelist, the optimists. Other panels are riddled with realists, or even worse pessimists, who either think too much about the answers or worse, never seem to like any new products.
Said one satisfied CMK professional at P&G, “We used to have repeatability problems fielding the exact same study just a few week later or with another sample vendor which would yield totally different results. With Optimist(TM) we know what to expect, the same great results every single time!”
“We simply took our own advice and listened to our customers”, said Tom H. C. Anderson, Managing Partner of Anderson Analytics, “They always questioned and had problems with negative findings, they said ‘give me something I’m not afraid to take to management’, so we did”.
Another satisfied customer at Kraft Foods has been using Optimist(TM) for several weeks now, and as a result has launched over 60 new flavors of Jello. “We had almost started thinking line extensions and new varieties of our products were a bad idea” said Kraft head of Market Insights “But we were just talking to the wrong people”. Some of the new exciting Jello flavors include Asparagus, Spinach, Red Herring, and Hamburger .
While most consumer packaged goods marketers typically can only hope to get new and different, overall likeability, and purchase intent top-two-box scores in the neighborhood of 60%, using Optimist(TM) the top-box scores alone usually exceed 95%!
Open-ended responses match top-box ratings and Anderson Analytics no longer needs to detect negative sentiment in their text mining tools. Panelist comments like these from the recent Jello tests are common:
“I frickin love Jello! I would eat any flavor you could make! If you had a hamburger, pea, and fries flavor Jello I’d never eat anything but Jello!”
“Why haven’t you thought of this earlier. I could go on a Jello only diet. I can’t think of any flavor I wouldn’t buy a lot of. Thank you so much!”
Mr. Anderson is very optimistic about client feedback on Optimist(TM). “We’re launching line extensions of Optimist(TM) as we speak”. Look forward to Optimist MROC(TM) launching next week where discussion board participants are specifically recruited and incentivized because they love your products.
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10 responses so far ↓
1 Steve Hallman // Apr 1, 2010 at 4:10 am
Tom:
GREAT idea!
In a past client-side role, I had the pleasure and opportunity to research (and subsequently kill off) some poor product ideas. Fortunately my researched subjects agreed. It would save a lot of time and money to avoid dealing with the uncertainty of a representative sample. Is there a Pessimist product in the works, too?
2 Alberto Stracuzzi // Apr 1, 2010 at 5:10 am
I want it! I want to buy it! But you have to deliver a new version: Enthusiast(TM, of course)…
3 Tom Ewing // Apr 1, 2010 at 8:52 am
A truly groundbreaking product Tom! I think the competition will be worried. I don’t mind admitting we’ve been thinking along similar lines at Kantar - in a 140-character age having 5 boxes seems ridiculously indulgent. So we’ve been trialling “one-box” rating scales - that box being “awesome”.
4 uberVU - social comments // Apr 1, 2010 at 9:55 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by tomderuyck: RT @TomHCAnderson: Anderson Analytics Launches The Market Research Product of the Year http://ow.ly/1tq3z #mr #marketresearch…
5 Kjoyce // Apr 1, 2010 at 9:45 pm
@tomewing - your awesome top box strategy will be game changing!
In more news, Peanut Labs launched a very different panel. It’s called WOTE (TM) - Worser of Two Evils - where we like to encourage our clients to simply choose by picking the one they haven’t tried yet.
This panel eliminates the need to fret over representitiveness or randomness b/c the data provides neither.
SLAM DUNK!
6 Tom H C Anderson // Apr 2, 2010 at 8:55 am
I like that 1 box rating scale question
Looking around at some of the other MR posts from yesterday it’s both intereting and scary how similar many of them were.
7 Pat Molloy // Apr 3, 2010 at 7:45 am
“Optimism has a bright future.”
“Optimism always wins, until nobody is around to know that it did not”
Tor Norretranders in “What are you OPTIMISTIC about”, edited by John Brockman.
8 Dan Kvistbo // Apr 4, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Fantastic idea Tom. However, I fear that the wealth of access panels out there recruiting on promises that you’ll ‘earn-thousands-of-dollars-taking-online-surveys’ might have beaten you to it? Surely, you’ll find a fair share of happy-go-lucky people in their panels too. Suggest you dedupe
As they say, there’s a bit of truth to every…
9 Ton Otker // Apr 5, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Hi Tom,
Best April 1 jokepost ever???
The idea is okay; also covered in the book “The Superpromoter”by Rijn Vogelaar of Blauw Research. English version later this year.
10 Tom H. C. Anderson // Apr 11, 2010 at 9:45 pm
I thought the most ironic part of our release was the last sentence. Because that’s the way MROCs work currently…
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