Duh!, even I did it

Before you can think of the various possible and pleasurable meanings for the dangling ‘it’ in the title let me clarify the noun it is pointing to. It is ‘Marketing Research’. 🙂 Well, there is nothing to be pissed off about it. Infact the story of my stint with marketing research dates back to day before yesterday.

Lets start at the begining of the whole thing.

When the marketing club selected me to work on a consultancy project for a media gaint i was jumping with joy. After a meet with the company people we got to know what exactly they need from us. As with the case of most of the marketing projects this one also involved the design, execution, analysis of the survey. Without getting into the technicalities of the survey lets talk about what happened when the legend himself did the survey along with 7 others in a city in hindi hinterland.

Due to my dumb luck i was allocated a rural place on the outskirts of indore to perform the survey. Our team had 3 more members. 2 (me and kiran) are from south and 2 (pankaj and shrey) are from delhi. After getting down the gaadi we broke in to 2 small teams each with a well mixture of south and north Indians.

Thus me and shrey marched towards the small shopping area. After asking a couple of people and failing to find the customer of our brand we finally found the first unfortunate member of our little sample. To my luck that person knows English. Thank God, the survey went on in English.

(1)
The troubles started when i suggested that we interview the cycle shop worker. Shrey wasnt very receptive to this idea and he asked me to go ahead with the poor worker. With a great difficulty i approached him and shot my first firearm towards the language barrier.

Me: “Bhai saab, kay aap ….. …. hi?”
respondent: “haan”
m: “kya aap paanch minute de sakte hi? mein ….. …. se aa raha hoon, ek survey karne ke liye.”
res: “boliye”
….
….
m: (mutters to myself, ‘how the f%^# i can say does xxx satisfy your needs in Hindi’) “kya, kya, kya ….”
res: (totally confused now) kya?
m: (looks out for shrey, shrey comes in for rescue, me feels totally relieved)

(2)
Soon we entered the residential area of the village. Me went up to a home with weird architecture of 2 fron doors for the same portion and both wide open with no one in the first room. Thankfully i dint enter the house. But soon an young lady came out and asked what the hell i am doing there with her expressions. I said i am there to do a survey with my hindi. She went to the other rooms and fetched a 28ish women in saadi for the interview. Fortunately this women is a consumer of the brand. This time i had a different shock. The women thought i am actually from the company. she started complaining about the product and requesting for an improvement. I felt like running away.

(3)
After sometime shrey suggested that we do the survey from a shop selling saadis. It turned out the owners are again our consumers. It also turned out that they are not from indore. We proceeded with our likert scales and close ended questions just like a cold blooded assassin going through his routine job of slashing heads. finally the survey was over and we said dhanyawaad and started to leave. The owners offerd cha. We declined politely. It then turned out that they are damn rigid about the proposal of tea outing with them. Finally we had to give in and sat there waiting for cha. Then the owner broke in. he said “Tho batayiye” as if we are some long last friends meeting in 25th reunion of kindergarten. Baaah! Finally the tea came. We gave the owner a break from his incessant verbiage and started sipping the tea. As we are finished with the tea and about to leave the owner asked whether we would like to have paan or supadi. I felt like chewing him alive.

(4)
With not much luck on begging people for responces and still not given up, i started towards a house which has 4 women sitting outside it. The congregation has 2 elderly women and one young women and one girl. I approached them and asked if they …… our product (in Hindi). The girl looked at me and then looked at the young one. Then both of them looked at the older ones. Then the oldre ones looked towards sky and resumed with what they were doing before i attacked them. Duh!, Even I Did It.

Tada!

Hello Awesome...

My name is Chandoo. Thanks for dropping by. My mission is to make you awesome in Excel & your work. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. When I am not F9ing my formulas, I cycle, cook or play lego with my kids. Know more about me.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Visit Excel for Beginner or Advanced Excel pages to learn more or join my online video class to master Excel.

Thank you and see you around.