Question 1

How do you write a survey that gives useful answers?

Accepted Answer

By recognising that **the question shapes the answer**, and that most surveys measure the phrasing rather than the opinion — which is why two surveys on the same subject routinely reach opposite conclusions.

**The failures that corrupt results:**

**Leading questions.** "How helpful did you find our new feature?" assumes helpfulness. Neutral phrasing produces different numbers from the same people.

**Double-barrelled questions.** "Was the service fast and friendly?" cannot be answered by someone who found it fast and rude.

**Unbalanced scales**, where positive options outnumber negative ones, which shifts results measurably.

**Missing options**, forcing a choice that does not reflect the respondent's view — always consider "none of these" and "not applicable".

**Assumed knowledge or vocabulary**, where respondents guess rather than admit unfamiliarity.

**Asking about frequency vaguely.** "Often" means different things to different people; ask "how many times in the last seven days".

**Asking about the distant past**, which measures memory rather than behaviour.

**Length.** Completion quality degrades sharply after a few minutes, and the later answers are worse than the earlier ones.

**The sampling problem, which is larger than any wording issue.** Who **responds** differs systematically from who was asked — people with strong opinions, more time, and an existing relationship respond disproportionately. A survey sent to your own mailing list tells you about your most engaged customers and **nothing about the market**. This is why customer satisfaction scores drift upward as unhappy customers stop replying.

**What good practice looks like:** decide what decision the results will inform **before** writing anything; ask the fewest questions that answer it; put demographic questions last; randomise option order where relevant; **pilot it with a handful of people** and ask them what each question meant to them, which reliably finds two or three you misread; and report the response rate alongside the results.

**Open-ended questions** produce the most insight and the most work, and one at the end is usually worth it.

**Do not incentivise in a way that attracts people who only want the incentive.**

Question 2

How do you interview customers usefully?

Accepted Answer

By asking about what they actually did, not what they think or would do — because people are unreliable narrators of their own future behaviour and reliable reporters of their past. The central rule.

Question 3

What are category entry points?

Accepted Answer

The situations, needs and moments that prompt someone to think of a category at all — and the argument, from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, is that brands are chosen by being mentally available at

Question 4

What is the difference between impressions and reach?

Accepted Answer

Impressions count how many times content was displayed. Reach counts how many distinct people saw it. If one person sees an advertisement five times, that is five impressions and a reach of one. The

Question 5

What is brand lift measurement?

Accepted Answer

Measuring whether advertising changed what people think — awareness, recall, consideration, favourability — rather than what they immediately bought. It exists because a great deal of advertising

Question 6

How do you write a case study?

Accepted Answer

As a story with numbers, structured so a reader recognises their own situation in the first paragraph — because a case study that does not resemble the reader's circumstances persuades nobody,

Question 7

How to write effective landing page copy?

Accepted Answer

Effective landing page copy requires understanding your audience, creating a strong value proposition, and using persuasive language. Incorporate social proof and a clear CTA for better conversions.

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