“Ugh” vs. “LFG!”: How Americans judged 21 mostly Super Bowl-inspired things
Last year, I ran a poll asking ~300 Americans whether 21 Super Bowl–related things were “Overrated” or “Underrated.”
The most overrated item was “Super Bowl tickets.” The most underrated was “Dip.”
It’s Super Bowl week again, so I decided to re-run the survey.
This time, though, I made things more interesting.
This year’s list still includes Super Bowl stuff, but I added a few curveballs, including:
• “Donald Trump making the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday.”
• “Fox News Dads”
• “The Black Plague killing a third of Europe.”
I also made two methodological changes.
First, instead of “Overrated” and “Underrated,” I switched to “Ugh” and “LFG!” (as in Let’s Fucking Go).
Second, I kept the split between respondents based on which team they were rooting for, but added a third option for people who were not cheering for either, “Homemade Guacamole.”
I didn’t really define, “Homemade Guacamole.”
I figured that people would get it as a “third option.”
(Btw nearly 71% of the 275 respondents selected “Homemade Guacamole.”)
So, here you go…
One thing to say about the results
You'd think that "arriving at work right when your audiobook gets good" wouldn't be as bad as a plague that killed 25 million people. Yet it received nearly the same number of "ugh" votes: 6% versus 3%.
Of course, audiobook timing isn’t as bad as the Black Death, and the only reason I can compare the two is because I made respondents rank them on the same scale.
Methodologically, it’s bad design.
But sometimes bad design is the point. Sometimes putting two completely unrelated things on a made-up dimension lets you see things a standard question never would.
For example, asking people to rate a brand’s customer support, a missed flight, and a full night’s sleep on a scale from “I’m dead inside” to “hallelujah” isn’t methodologically pure — but it shows you where the brand lands in the hierarchy of real-life problems.
The problem is that you'd never see "LFG!" and "Ugh" in a market research survey. Not because they're bad options — but because offices reward language that works in a conference room full of stakeholders.
There are good reasons “proper” scales exist. They scale, they compare cleanly, and they come from a long tradition—George Gallup included—worth studying.
But when you’re trying to understand what shoppers want, methodology is like grammar: useful, but secondary to the story you want to tell.
My two cents: write for people on the couch, not people in the meeting.
Resources
• Data Visualization (re-use and edit this template with a free DataWrapper account)
• The Survey I used to collect data
• The Data
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Cheers,
Sam