AMA Awards Survey Bias Research

The American Marketing Association is set to honour its annual award winners at a 'Frontiers in Services' conference this June in Maastricht, The Netherlands. This year's best services marketing award will go to recent work done on the limitations and biases that a survey can introduce to the research process.

The research was originally carried out by Chezy Ofir, associate professor of marketing at Hebrew University School of Business Administration, and Itamar Simonson, who is Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at Stanford Business School. It was featured in the Journal of Marketing Research (May 2001, pages 170-82) as published in the US.

The study found that, when people are told in advance that they will be later asked to evaluate any service or product, they tend to provide more negative evaluations and are less satisfied with that service than otherwise. For example, in one of their studies, computer users who requested technical service and knew in advance that they would be subsequently asked to rate the provided service, gave significantly more negative evaluations than others.

Similarly, viewers of a TV programme who were informed in advance that they would evaluate the programme perceived it more negatively than consumers who were informed of the evaluation task only after watching the programme. These findings have important implications for the common practice of measuring customer satisfaction.

The article, 'In Search of Negative Customer Feedback: The Effect of Expecting to Evaluate on Satisfaction Evaluations,' was deemed best services article for 2001 by the Services Marketing Special Interest Group of the American Marketing Association. It was also singled out as having made the greatest contribution to services literature during the year.

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.