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An old colleague's friend had a job finding people for market research. She had to get people to fill in questionnaires about their lifestyle, spending habits, or whatever, and pick out the kind of people who fitted a profile that the market researchers wanted. This was a lot of effort, so she didn't bother. She just told her friends what kind of person they were supposed to be, split her fee with them, and they turned up to do the market research. Sometimes there weren't enough friends available, or it wasn't wise to have the same people show up too often, and so I helped out.
I went to one about a deodorant advert. I forget what sort of person I was supposed to be. The sort who buys deodorant? On an evening after work I joined several other people in a room above a shop. We sat on a couple of big sofas. The man running the session played us some adverts, one of which was for deodorant. We weren't supposed to know in advance what the product was, but it was obvious because the other ads were plainly fake. Only one was like a real TV advert. I played dumb. The man in charge asked questions. Did any of the adverts stand out? What did we remember about the products?
Not long into the session, one of the other people noticed something on the floor just under their sofa. It was a dead mouse. A couple of the people sitting near put their feet up on the sofa. Someone kicked it further under the sofa to get rid of it. The man in charge steered the conversation back to the product.
The session was longer that I expected. They wanted to know a lot about their deodorant advert. But suddenly someone said "EURGH!" because now little plump maggots were crawling across the carpet away from the mouse carcas. Everyone's feet came up off the floor. No one was thinking about deodorants. We all looked at the maggots and discussed what to do. I waited for the market researchers to apologise and suspend the session, at least until the mouse and the maggots had been cleaned up. But no. The man in charge got quite pissed off with us because we wanted to talk about the dead mouse and not about his shiny product. Bizarrely, we gave in and talked about deodorants some more. But I don't think our hearts were in it, if they ever had been.
I have no idea if the other people in the session were as fake as I was. Maybe market research meetings are all full of friend-of-a-friend of the person who can't be bothered to get the questionnaires filled?