"Brand loyalty is really just a polished turd version of 'consumer whore'"
- "Primary reason" is jargon — fails the IRL test immediately
- The preamble is metadiscourse — it talks about the survey instead of asking the question
- Passes the IRL test — three words, no jargon, nothing lost
- Preamble cut entirely — the question leads
The subject line is in quotes because it’s something a respondent wrote in a survey I conducted a few years ago.
I’ve since pledged to never use marketing jargon in a survey again.
Maybe you’ve been there. You scroll through responses like a chef tasked with making a gourmet meal with a single can of beans.
I have a "method" for avoiding this situation.
I call it the “IRL” test.
You take a survey question you’re working on and ask a friend from outside work the question. If your friend does not react by wondering why you sound like an idiot, the question passes the test.
“What was your primary reason for purchasing today?”
With the “IRL” test this post-checkout question becomes:
“Why’d you buy?”
A great feature of the "IRL" test is that it eliminates virtually every survey question you'd find in a free template or on Survey Monkey, thereby saving you a spreadsheet full of unusable garbage.
It also helps to reveal the subtle influence work has on how we speak by getting you to think outside your professional box. Brand loyalty is a polished turd version of “consumer whore” and the “IRL” test would have revealed about as much.
My Roasts focus on this exact problem – trimming the jargon, taking context into account, and editing questions so they sound like something a person would actually say amongst friends.
If you’ve ever struggled to write questions that don’t sound like they were written by some detached analytical nerd, then consider booking one.
Just click the link below, we’ll fix your survey, and I’ll tell you what else the “consumer whore” guy said.
Sam