The current primary season in the US provides an exciting time for both political junkies and the number junkies. The stats that have been pouring out from the contests is great data to analyze. It is also interesting to follow the polling of various contests and how on/off the mark they get from time to time. Polling is now getting to these ridiculous daily polls. I often wonder if there is anyone left in the country who hasn’t been polled.
There have been so many errors in the polls even in the ones that were taken a day before and the reasons for them are simple – it is primarily due to sampling errors. The pollsters made mistakes in accurately representing the likely-to-vote population. Some errors creep in due to people not accurately reflecting their choices or change their minds at the last minute.
Why am I talking about this? Similar survey and polls have relevance in the technology world especially in services and products that are consumer oriented. Many companies and service providers fall into the trap of “what consumers say they want.” I always had a feeling that people don’t always accurately reflect their choices either consciously or unconsciously. To prove this point, i looked at data to see the differences between the same user w.r.t. their explicit (what they say) and implicit (what they do) preferences and the results were quite revealing. Majority of the people (80%+) don’t always do what they say – meaning they might indicate that one band is their top choice but their actions reveal something totally different. Also, their preferences evolve and change over time so a survey done today will be outdated in 6 months for the same person.
We have a section in the book “Mobile Advertising” where I looked at some data provided by AgentArts (which got acquired by FAST which got acquired by Microsoft) and present my findings in the section “Pay attention to what i do, Not what i Say”
Always be careful about the data you gather and make sure it represents reality before you start analyzing and crafting strategies based on them.