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Questioning ordinary people’s contribution to marketing is akin to Pussy Riot challenging Putin’s rule in a church – it’s heresy. Yet neuropsychology, behavioural economics and more recently Byron Sharp suggest that our notion of consumer-centricity and what it means to ‘listen’ to people are based on a naïve concept of human beings and the world we live in.

We’ve come a long way in the practice of survey research in terms of understanding and managing sources of error such as scale usage bias, but an accumulation of research into the unobservable cognitive processes that come into play when respondents answer survey questions shows that crafting survey questions that reliably elicit the information we think we are asking for is no easy matter. In fact, the survey question may be the weakest link in the chain of components that comprise the typical quantitative market research study.