Alston Grove

There is a section of the population that responds to surveys. I am not in that section. A piece of mail from J. D. Power and associates arrived by post, and I opened it for some reason. “Another survey,” I muttered to myself after I saw the questionnarie. But before I tossed it away, I noticed they had enclosed a crisp one-dollar bill. I instantly had two thoughts. First, why bother insulting someone with such a paltry incentive? Second, I wondered if the postman would figure it out and collect all the letters. (I quickly realized that the surveys are randomly dispersed, so a single local postman wouldn’t have much of a shot at collecting the money.) But the first thought still puzzled me.

Back to that section of the population that responds to surveys. It turns out that it’s typically 2 percent. That statistic alone isn’t the worst problem for a marketer. The bigger problem is that the people who do fill out the survey are the kind of people who fill out surveys. In other words, it’s not a good sampling. So, marketers experimented with different incentives, like sending a cash incentive in the initial mailing, or entering respondents in a prize drawing. Of course, this affects the cost of running the survey. Experiments with cash incentives (for example, $1 and $2 vs $5 and $5 vs $10 vs $20) have been done and compared to a lottery of $250. The incentives drew more reponses, and the higher cash incentives drew more responses. But the biggest pop was from, you guessed it: a one-dollar bill.

If you use the “snooze” button too much like I do, maybe you should consider Clocky. It’s an alarm clock on wheels that hops off the night stand and rolls around aimlessly, forcing you to get up and chase it. People have posted video of Clocky to YouTube, and there’s even a Clocky Commercial. It’s like having R2D2 wake you up!