(holding sides with laughter)
Nov. 23rd, 2004 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iamomOkay, this is too funny. You might have to be a market researcher to get the joke, though. One of my clients was just telling me a story about a job he was just coding for Johnson and Johnson. He was categorizing the open-ended verbatim responses from a web survey into "choice codes".
Now, typically when you're coding verbatims, you'll get a number of variations on common themes. Usually you'll assign the subtle variations all the same code, with the notation "(net)" at the end of the code to denote that it contains all reasonable variations of that given response. For example, the following three open-ended comments could reasonably be classified in the same "choice code" of "Low prices (net)":
Respondent #1: They have good prices.
Respondent #2: They're the cheapest in town.
Respondent #3: Their prices are the lowest.
So like I said, this guy is coding a project for Johnson and Johnson, and he gets to a question about their well-known product, KY-Jelly. Well, all of a sudden he reads a comment that says something like, "I like it when my husband uses KY with me, and he likes it when I use it on him orally." So immediately he's like, "Shit, what the hell am I gonna call this one? Sucking dick (net)?"
(pause for laughter)
Now c'mon, that's funny. I totally lost it laughing, and my wife and daughter are fast asleep in the next two rooms. He ended up assigning that respondent and a few others like it the code for "Stimulation/pleasure (net)". Hopefully the corporate cronies at Johnson and Johnson will understand the significance of that euphemism. It means that some folks are really using that product for its intended purpose, which is, of course, a marketing researcher's dream come true at a company like that. :)
Now, typically when you're coding verbatims, you'll get a number of variations on common themes. Usually you'll assign the subtle variations all the same code, with the notation "(net)" at the end of the code to denote that it contains all reasonable variations of that given response. For example, the following three open-ended comments could reasonably be classified in the same "choice code" of "Low prices (net)":
Respondent #1: They have good prices.
Respondent #2: They're the cheapest in town.
Respondent #3: Their prices are the lowest.
So like I said, this guy is coding a project for Johnson and Johnson, and he gets to a question about their well-known product, KY-Jelly. Well, all of a sudden he reads a comment that says something like, "I like it when my husband uses KY with me, and he likes it when I use it on him orally." So immediately he's like, "Shit, what the hell am I gonna call this one? Sucking dick (net)?"
(pause for laughter)
Now c'mon, that's funny. I totally lost it laughing, and my wife and daughter are fast asleep in the next two rooms. He ended up assigning that respondent and a few others like it the code for "Stimulation/pleasure (net)". Hopefully the corporate cronies at Johnson and Johnson will understand the significance of that euphemism. It means that some folks are really using that product for its intended purpose, which is, of course, a marketing researcher's dream come true at a company like that. :)
