Are you buying survey data the wrong way? Are you buying survey data the wrong way?

The problem with the survey industry

Industries evolve. Clothing, once stitched by hand, is now made by the millions. Houses, once built with hand-carved detailing, are now assembled from standardized parts.

Surveys are no exception. What was once personal and deliberate is now available at a massive scale.

It's progress ... but not without its sacrifices.

From craft to commodity: How we got here

Once upon a time, you knew who answered your survey. A signature on a clipboard. A registered phone number on the other end. Even early online panels were limited to curated mailing lists.

But as technologies evolved, so did fraud.

“ And the thing is, fraud does not sit still. There are hundreds of thousands of fraudsters who try to break into our surveys every day. Every check meets a new workaround. And of course, fraud prevention alone does not guarantee quality,” says Krishnan.

But in a $119B industry competing on volume, most providers skip nuance and sell certainty: tell us how many answers you need, and when, and out comes your data.

Somewhere along the way, surveys went from a bespoke service to a packaged commodity.

Our recent study shows the real cost of these shortcuts. For example, providers set their own thresholds for how many surveys someone can attempt in a day — and they rarely tell you where that line is, let alone the data quality trade-offs.

That’s how you end up with data that’s not always good… just good-looking.

It’s time to change that.

What buyers can do: Resist the commodity mindset

“You wouldn’t accept a candidate without checking their references. And you wouldn’t expect to buy a home at half the market price in a prime neighbourhood,” says Barrere.

Surveys are no different. They are an amazing way to gather human insights, but they need to be done right.

Progress only starts when buyers resist the commodity mindset. Because in high-stakes decisions, if you can’t see the risks… how can you trust the results?