One lunchtime I was walking with a workmate through the centre of the city in which I used to work and a woman stopped us both and asked if we could spare time for a quick survey. We had, and were duly surveyed.
The essence of this survey was what we thought about the name of a new beer. I won't tell you its name because it came to pass that enough people liked it and thus it may be your favourite tipple, though I haven't seen it for years and in all fairness to the brewing business some of these wonderful ales do come and go as tastes vary and sales rise and fall.
Anyway, the survey drew something of a blank between the two us. My mate loved the name and said he would definitely drink it (I presume if someone else was buying a round as he was always careful with money) but I struck out his plus by saying no, the name definitely didn't appeal to me (but yes I would drink it if someone else was buying the round as I was even more careful with money.)
We left the woman standing there with her clipboard, contemplating a plus and a minus but as I say there must have been more positives than negatives because the product appeared in pubs not long after.
Now as someone who has been both surveyed and has done the surveying (memorably once finding out that me and the department I managed would have to keep asking the public the same question until they agreed with my Managing Director's opinion) I do know something of this. A relative of mine too did surveys for a time and had to find things like men over sixty who chewed gum, and so on, though she did once do a survey for the cover of the 'Trainspotting' DVD which I imagine was a lot more fun than seeking out old men who probably did not have all their own teeth.
All this brings me to news of a new survey, trumpeted by the media (in other words, they got a press release and there was nothing else happening) about the mental health of kids. It made, as these surveys do, heart-rending reading. So many kids bullied, so many under pressure for grades and forced to play online games and achieving high scores, so much pressure to buy the latest and coolest, so much unhappiness caused by stress caused by, well, stressful things.
I don't doubt for a moment that there are lots of kids out there who are stressed and suffering. God knows, I went through a childhood where there was stress too. Bullying, pressure (exams, and real exams at that, not just 'course work') and being slagged off for not having the best. Most of us will have gone through this, and yet we survived. We all know the lovely idea of childhood being some sort of carefree romp towards adulthood is nothing more than a myth. Like the same myth generated endlessly on TV of people who smile inanely when they are given fish fingers for tea, or sit on a new sofa for the first time.
While the actors and models in the ads gain overwhelming happiness from such little things (and possibly get paid, too), the rest of us don't. We just have to get through the day and eat our fish fingers without being swept away on a tide of joy. Combine your chewing with sitting on a new sofa and you are truly in heaven.
But what I have learned is that a lot depends in any survey in what exactly is being asked. If a survey asks someone "are you unhappy?" the chances are they will either say yes or no, and as happiness is something of an elusive commodity (especially when you are not eating fish fingers at that very moment) you are likely to get more of the 'yes, I am unhappy.' But if someone should ask 'how unhappy are you on a scale of one to five?' then there is a degree of unhappiness there to be measured. Even all those bland ones add up to something.
Now a lot of selling is asking a question to which people probably can't say "no." I was once stopped by an aggressive looking young man on the same street as the now infamous 'neutral result beer name' question and asked if I wanted to save more tax. As this would, I imagined require me to pay money to save more tax (and possibly a lot more paying than saving) coupled with me needing to get back to work in order to be in a position to go on paying tax, I did the unthinkable. I said "no."
The aggressive young man was astonished but got over it to bellow after me that I was an idiot and how I didn't care about the ones I loved and that one day all this would crumble away, and so on. But, I had said "no" and ideally should have kept on walking. But I am what I am and turned round to go back to tell the little shit how little I thought of him and his pathetic tax-scam company.
A fair exchange of views, I thought.
In selling you have to ask the questions that are supposed to only elicit a "yes" and go on from there. If you think people are unhappy (and bullied and under pressure) that is the question you will ask, especially if you have an agenda or something to sell. A lot of public-funded charities will ask the questions that justify their being.
None of them will ask: "Do you think people like us are a luxury in life which fulfils no real purpose other than to ensuring people like me can sit in nice offices and are paid a good wage for not doing anything productive?" There would be a lot more yes answers, methinks, than no.
Ask troubled kids if how much they are troubled and you start to get the answer you want.
Ask them if fish fingers for tea on mum's new settee makes them happy and you are likely to get more no answers than the yes variety, unless of course you make one or the other and then I bet the evidence of happiness is overwhelming.
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