News surveys: can we trust them?
Back in March, Stuart Bruce offered the, possibly good, news that bogus surveys work: ‘I will keep producing them for as long as journalists keep running them!’
The media are always hungry for facts and figures – new knowledge is news – and it doesn’t really care how reliable or biased a survey happens to be. You shouldn’t go as far as making it all up, but there’s nothing to stop PRs putting leading questions to small carefully selected samples. No matter how bogus the survey, if the media says it’s news then it is news.
Anyway. A survey need not be made up to be nonsense. In the mid-1990s, when I was a pub company PR, there was a moral panic over alcopops and strong cider. One brand in particular, Diamond White, got a particularly rough ride. An apparently bona fide survey of young teenagers revealed it was not unusual for them to down twelve pints of the stuff a night. Drunk in that quantity, Diamond White (available at the time, incidentally, only in 330ml bottles) could easily kill a thirteen year-old.
The researchers had been guilty of gross naivety. They’d failed to take into account that getting drunk is very, very cool to the teenagers who’d bragged wildly when interviewed. On that occasion the bogus survey backfired and its out-of-touch sponsor was much derided.
Alcohol abuse is a serious issue, but today’s revelation that young people drink to get drunk should be treated with circumspection.
Contact Stephen Newton
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