I agree, some people are in need of some kind of stimulation or the occasional "now that you mention it" type of question. I do not think that the two approaches (with and without guidelines) are mutually exclusive.
Can you point me to any good studies comparing the outcomes of both approaches? I am somewhat obsessed with mathematics and therefore highly interested.
Let's say 20000 people mail in suggestions to the president of x. Two of them mention that their most important concern is that the flowers next to the parking lot in their village should be blue ones. Biased sample or not, the chances of extremely infrequent complaints being actually among the most important ones in the nation are next to 0. Biased or not, noise and signal can be identified.
If I were Larian I would use it as the base for a survey taking more personal circumstances into consideration.
I guess the point of this thread is that people have invested a lot of time into feedback and they are waiting for Larian to acknowledge their awareness of some of the issues mentioned.
If I could suggest methodologies based in actual market research and what’s the difference between them I’d say I would go both AdHoc based (which is a Latin word for “to this” - used in cases that you have at least a slight comprehension of your marketing problem)
Now in adhoc you’ve both quali & quanti researches
Quali (in depth interview or IDI) (which is the survey that you’ve done) - is a research made with a small sample size and it’s commonly used for having an overall idea about the marketing problem . The way you conduct it is by using a guideline and the interviewer stimulate the interviewee to answer specific questions. It should feel that you are being interviewed by a tv reporter. Usually the respondents of that interview are specialists or playmakers because they have a broader vision of the problem in general.
You don’t usually want common folk to answer that because they are more narrow minded and as the sample size is small that would only jeopardize the research.
In Quantitative research it’s a different matter. Because the sample size matter and in that kind of research you already have the key buying factors of a product. After structuring the questionnaire you would run the survey and given the attributes considered highly important to the customers you will have a concrete estimation of their weight. USA elections surveys are quantitative for instance.
Now going to your presented case: 2 out of 20000 in sample size complained about something. Is this sample size representative to say that this is not statistically valid? This statistically is insufficient to prove that the matter is not representative. The correct way to approach whether this is relevant or not would be to ask for 2000 of them (because the error margin of that sample is around 2p.p) If they would like to have blue flowers instead.
Sorry for the misspellings. I’m not native and I’m on my cellphone right now
LARIAN run a damn market research!!!!!!!
