On 31/03/2012 12:12, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 11:42:22 on Sat, 31 Mar
2012, Graham Nye remarked:

Have you ever been involved in market research? They don't just pull
numbers out of a hat.

They might as well for some of the results they get. This seems
particularly likely if the "research" has been commissioned just
to provide an excuse for a press release and hence some free
publicity or if the questions given to the MR firm dictate what
answers are acceptable (as with the drinking survey Arthur saw not
permitting a choice of real ale).

This is a typical bit of Usenet nonsense, where people are too inclined
to rubbish the efforts of other professionals...

Would you care to defend the practices I mentioned? I'm left with
the impression that ABTA are an organisation that is happy to fling
round some half-baked statistics to grab some unjustified free
editorial coverage when it ought to be buying some advertising
space. Hardly the "expertise, reliability and fairness" their press
release claims their brand stands for. How does that constitute a
professional PR result? (It's possible, of course, that the
underlying market research was comprehensive and that the PR people
have selected an incoherent set of stats for their press release.)

... while claiming their own
activities are a tour de force that's beyond reproach from mere
amateurs.

Could you point me to the activities in my paragraph quoted above
that I am claiming that for?

Another characteristic is the odd non-sequitur that gets thrown
in. 40% of people taking time off during the games, eh? Wouldn't
have anything to do with the games occurring during the main
holiday season, would it?

I did wonder about that myself, but would 40% of the population
take a holiday during a normal mid-August?

Offhand, I don't know myself. One thing's sure, though - we
aren't going to find out from this press release. I'd expect
that a press release saying how the Olympics affected holiday
plans would list the holiday-going statistics for non-Olympic
years as an obvious way to establish a baseline for comparison
but what would I know? I'm not a PR/MR/statistics professional.


--
Graham Nye
news(a)thenyes.org.uk