All survey results are not created equal. Sometimes, it’s just people answering whatever question happens to be put to them, not a real opinion that reflects some firmly held attitude or belief. This caution is especially important nowadays since contemporary surveys generally rely on prequalified panels of respondents who are compensated for answering.
Mind you, I’m not flagging anything new. This issue is well-known and well-worn. It’s been investigated extensively in decades of research on research. But that doesn’t mean we’ve reached a point where we can rely willy-nilly on every survey result we see. We must apply a more discerning eye, and it would be nice if there was something to help us.
Dan Yankelovich—founder, namesake and leading light of the firm I worked at and ran for many years—also had the idea 45 years ago that survey results should be reported with some indicator of reliability. To that end, he developed the Mushiness Index, a four-item battery that gauges whether answers to a survey question are more or less mushy. It came out of a two-year, multimillion-dollar project underwritten by Time, for which the firm was conducting regular opinion polling. Results were made freely available, and Dan’s hope was that it would catch on as standard practice. Unfortunately, it did not. But what was learned remains relevant.
We can use the four elements of mushiness to make sense of some of the confounding things we see today in opinion data. Why do so few sustainably-minded people buy green? Lack of personal relevance. Why do facts never fix people’s fascination with fake news? The key is self-perception of knowledgeability, not the sort of information. What do social media echo chambers tell us about deliberative democracy? That discussions with others do, indeed, firm up opinions, yet often in polarizing ways not in consensus-building ways. What makes strong, even iconic brands vulnerable to boycotts by their heaviest users? Brand loyalty that is on shakier ground than surveys suggest.
The importance of mushiness is that opinions are unstable and often contradictory when people don’t have a stake or don’t know much or haven’t thought it through or remain open to changing their minds. Dan thought that survey results that are mushy in one or more of these ways should be flagged as such, so that decision-makers do not build a house of brands or public policy on a foundation of sand.
A couple of things stood out in the original work conducted for the Mushiness Index. First, opinions about foreign policy issues were mushier than opinions about domestic policy issues. Which is indicative of the disproportionate power of personal relevance. Second, opinions were mushier when questions were framed as being opposed to something versus being in favor of something. This echoes work that was being done independently at roughly the same time by social psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who found, among other things, that people were more risk-averse when the outcome of a decision was framed as a loss rather than as a gain.
True for brands as well. People are more attached to brands with which they feel a personal connection, whether it’s a unique functional solution or some deep emotional resonance. And allegiance is strongest when people not only favor a brand but oppose an alternative, because they feel that however good it might be, it’s not good enough to avoid a loss.
Once again, I’m not flagging anything new. But I’m calling it out because our thinking about brands can go astray if we are not scrutinizing survey data for mushiness. People are drawn to brands that deliver personal benefits in unique ways. In familiar lingo, we call that relevance and difference. There are many ways to survey people about relevance and difference, though. Ways that are more or less mushy.
Phantom needs and wants, loyalties, and likes, arise from mushiness. Brands that veer off in those directions lose relevance and difference because they are chasing things that people don’t really care about or are likely to change their minds about.
I’m not saying take every survey result with a grain of salt. But I am saying make mushiness your taste tester before you swallow it whole.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar
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