SurveyUSA’s Center for Consumer Research

We’ve got opinions about opinions.

Market research is broken. It’s been this way for years, and keeps getting worse and worse. Million-dollar decisions are driven by data loaded up with fraudulent respondents and AI-generated answers. Just as bad, even consumers who want to answer your questions truthfully are being offered surveys so badly designed that they tune out and say whatever they need just to make it end. Agencies talk about their fraud-prevention tools, but they’re far from perfect, and more importantly, they can’t do anything about all the bad data that’s being created by real respondents who are faced with terrible questions that they just can’t answer — even if they want to.

You can’t make good decisions with bad data.

15-20 minute surveys are producing data you can’t trust. You’re paying people pennies and asking them questions they can’t possibly answer, creating data that — even if it were accurate — would produce no real learning. Asking 2 dozen questions about each of 3 dozen brands — even ones the respondent has barely heard of before — is not good practice: it’s respondent abuse. Abused respondents transform from consumers with strong opinions into trapped research subjects who will deny knowing even the brands they love — because they realize each time they click “familiar,” they’re going to get another 30 questions about something they’ve barely even heard of. You’re asking head-scratchers about how likely people are to recommend banks, telephone carriers, or cat foods to friends, or how close they feel to various brands, or making them rank a dozen TVs by how much each makes them feel 2 dozen emotions. People just don’t think about brands this way. Other projects ask questions in impenetrable industry jargon, or run respondents through nightmare grids or endless picklists with hundreds of unordered choices. The best sales tool SurveyUSA could possibly design is already out there — go join a panel or two and take a handful of surveys. If you think we’re exaggerating, you clearly haven’t done this in a while.

Better questions. Better answers. Actionable insights.

SurveyUSA focuses so closely on the respondent experience because we know engaged consumers are critical for creating meaningful data. Our questions are crafted by skilled professionals with backgrounds in writing and editing so that every questionnaire feels like a conversation, not an interrogation. Our clients interact with dedicated senior-level executives who know how long is too long, and who are empowered to make certain our respondents are happy ones. Bottom line? SurveyUSA asks better questions and gets better answers — which gives you better data.