Incentives as a Way to Raise Response Rates
Introduction
One of the biggest challenges marketing research agencies face around the world is reaching the target group to interview them — either because there are too few of them within a given population, or because their time is limited. I remember one day when we spent six months trying to interview a hundred specialists in vehicle fleet management. There weren’t many of them, and the ones who existed had no time to spare, while the actual plan of the agency running the research was to complete 400 interviews within two months. So was an incentive the best solution to guarantee hitting the target number of interviews? Today’s article is about exactly this subject. To begin with, let me make clear that there are two schools (two opposing views) when it comes to offering incentives. One supports it, and hardly carries out any research without setting aside a dedicated incentives budget; the other is completely against it, and has found professional alternatives to take the place of incentives.
What are incentives? In the marketing research industry, incentives represent the reward given to the target group in return for the time they give to take part in a particular piece of marketing research.
Incentives come in several forms, both monetary and in-kind. Monetary: cash amounts or shopping vouchers, a dinner or lunch invitation, recharge cards. In-kind: gifts such as pens, perfumes, prayer beads. And there are other methods, such as holding a draw among the pool of participants, or donating a certain amount to a relevant charity for every survey that gets completed — or, as you see on the cover image of this article, a free chicken sandwich.
The View of the Opposing School
These people believe that the respondent takes part in a study without compensation for several reasons, among them: That the respondent believes their participation will, in one way or another, help improve the level of service or the quality of the product. That the respondent sees participation as something perfectly natural in more civilized societies, requiring no compensation. In certain cases, the respondent feels flattered when they find someone seeking out their opinion on a particular product or service. In certain cases, the respondent assumes the person interviewing them is someone of importance whom they ought to oblige. That the respondent is interested in the subject of the study and has knowledge or experience of it, and therefore wants to express their opinion — because the incentive isn’t everything. Personally, I’m willing to spend more than two hours taking part in a piece of marketing research if the subject matters to me or if I have knowledge or experience in it.
They also believe that incentives are a major cause of distorted results, because they become a motive for participants to take part simply to obtain the incentive offered in exchange for participation. This applies particularly to qualitative (descriptive) research, which takes at least an hour of the target’s time, so the incentive offered there is relatively high and tempting. And although what they say is true, it is the agency’s duty to tighten its recruitment mechanisms in order to exclude this category of respondents who came only for the incentive — usually the same group that makes the rounds of all the research agencies to fill empty seats in focus groups at the last minute. I talked about them in a previous article. In my personal view, it’s better to leave the seat empty than to fill it with an expert respondent who has taken part in dozens of studies before. The point of excluding him isn’t because he’s an expert or because he only wants the incentive, but because the specifications of the target group simply don’t apply to him in the first place.
The proponents of this school don’t object to offering some form of compensation, provided that, first of all, it is non-monetary, and second, that it only motivates those who will answer the survey honestly. For example, in surveys related to certain professional matters, the participant is given a promise that the main findings of the study will be shared with the respondent as soon as it concludes. Another example I really liked: in a concept-test study for a new product not yet on the market, the researcher proposed the idea of giving participants a discount on the product as soon as it launched. The person chasing quick gain, who participates only for the incentive, won’t be drawn in by this incentive if they aren’t genuinely interested in the product concept.
The View of the Supporting School
The proponents of the supporting school also have some logical arguments, particularly in the area of business or government research — B2B Research or B2G Research. Their main argument is that some of the targeted individuals can make a fortune in a single hour of their time, so why should they waste it with a field researcher? The issue here, in their words, is that the incentive given to them may hold no real monetary value for them; rather, its value is symbolic — like the plaques handed out, for instance, at a charity gala to a millionaire businessman. The plaque means nothing to him in material terms, but it has a symbolic value and an emotional connection to the act of giving, and later it will be nothing more than a memento. The proponents of this school advise setting clear standards and policies for researchers on how to handle incentives — relating to when, where, and how an incentive may be offered; giving a verbal explanation of why this incentive is being granted; emphasizing that the respondent can choose not to complete the interview and still remain entitled to the incentive; and watching for whether the respondent is participating solely to obtain the incentive, so that their participation can be excluded later if it’s confirmed that they took part only for the incentive.
At this link you’ll find an example of research titled: The Ethics of Paying Child Participants in Research (in English), which you can find here. The proponents of this school believe that in this day and age you can’t get anything for free, and therefore there must be a reward in return for the time the targeted respondent will give you.
Commentary on the Two Schools’ Views
The discussion above relates to all data-collection methods conducted through face-to-face interviews — specifically the quantitative ones, which won’t take much of the respondent’s time. And any survey that takes up no more than fifteen minutes of the customer’s time doesn’t require an incentive, in my personal view, because the matter can turn into a culture if every participant is granted an incentive indiscriminately — especially if research industry practices spread in a given country and become known to people. If research agencies accustom participants to receiving monetary or in-kind incentives in exchange for their participation, getting them to participate without incentives in the future will become harder.
As for interviews that run longer than fifteen minutes, the idea of an incentive must be taken into consideration, and the incentive should match the nature of the target group. As for research conducted by email (which used to be done by regular mail), the consensus among the research community is that it requires a symbolic incentive. In one study conducted in Britain on a database of subscribers to a research website who are regularly sent surveys by email, they were asked this time how important participation was to them: 43% of the importance factors related to participation incentives, while the remaining reasons were as follows — 17% enjoy taking part in surveys, 17% want their voices to be heard by decision-makers, 15% are driven by curiosity and a desire to explore, and 4% found the topic of participation important to them. Of course, these results don’t generalize to other countries; if the same research were conducted elsewhere, the results would differ because of cultural differences. This is where the role of research agencies comes in — to conduct similar types of research to understand the tendencies and make the fullest use of their financial resources.
Conclusion
At the start of the article I gave an example to push the reader to think. In truth, the agency’s failure to offer an incentive in that example isn’t the only reason it didn’t succeed in reaching the target sample within the predetermined timeframe. Several factors come into play, some of which may relate to poor planning, and also to the caliber of the researchers who carried out the study and their low level of personal skill — such that the researcher gives the target no reason to cooperate with him. But if you were to ask me, dear reader, whether placing an incentive in this study would have raised the response rate and sped up the completion of the project, the answer is certainly no — assuming the incentive was a tempting one.
In the end, an incentive is needed in certain cases and should be offered according to the type of research and the type of target group. But the marketing researcher’s skill lies in knowing when, where, and how a given incentive can be offered, and when there’s no need for it at all. So was the free sandwich idea a good one? It’s creative, but only the researchers themselves can judge its usefulness. And dear readers, please — as a favor, not an order — share your views with us.
And God knows best; to Him belongs the guidance of the way.
