You have never asked your customer a question

Think about what your brand knows about the person who bought a pack of your product yesterday. Not the category, not the panel, not the retail audit. That person.

You know that a distributor took stock. You may know what a sample of stores sold. You do not know who bought it, whether they had bought it before, or what they thought of it. There is no way to ask, because there is no line between you and them.

What brands do instead

They buy research. A panel is recruited, screened and paid to answer questions about a category. It is useful work, and it has one structural weakness that no amount of sample size fixes: the panel is people who say they buy your product. The purchase is claimed, not proven.

The cheapest research in the world is a question asked of someone who has just bought the thing.

The moment you have been missing

When a shopper scans a code from inside your pack, three things are true at once, and they are never true together anywhere else. They definitely bought it. They are holding it. And they are already in a conversation with you, because they are waiting to be paid.

That is the moment to ask a question — and to pay them for the answer, out of the same budget that pays the reward.

How to ask so people actually answer

• One question at a time. A form with eight fields gets abandoned; a single question with three buttons gets tapped.
• Buttons, not typing. Most answers should be a tap. Save free text for the one question where the words matter.
• Short. Four questions is a survey. Twelve is an interview nobody agreed to.
• Paid on finishing, and say so at the start. You are buying their time, not extracting a favour.

The drop-off is data too

Answers are saved as they arrive, not at the end. So if half the people who start stop at question three, you learn something about question three: it is confusing, too personal, or too long.

A research agency would call that a fieldwork problem and quietly fix it. Run the survey yourself, on the people who bought, and it is a finding you can act on in the same week.

What to do with the first one

Resist the urge to ask everything. The first survey on a campaign should answer one question you would actually change a decision over: why they picked your pack this time, what they nearly bought instead, or whether the new size is the right size.

Then the answers arrive attached to a purchase you can prove — which is more than any panel can offer, and cheaper than most of them.