Mystery Shopping Company

A woman believed she was saving money by picking up every single promotion going in the Mystery Shopping Company. But when we came to add up the things she had bought on promotion, we found she had actually spent more money.

In both cases, the women weren't lying. It's just that their belief structure, which makes them happy, led them to perceive a different reality.

But how genuinely are people going to behave when they have a person holding a video camera a few feet away? "It would be surprising if the presence of an impartial ob-server had no effect on behavior," Jim Oliver, automotive director at GfK Great Britain, thinks.

In Salari's experience, if a family is not behaving naturally, it's the easiest thing to pick up on screen. "If I come in and see that they've spent the whole day polishing the kitchen, then I know it isn't going to work," he says. "But if I turn up and they treat me as if I was a pain in arise, then I know things are going to be fine."

The extent of the interviewer's partiality also raises a question mark. Salari admits: "Sometimes it becomes tempting to try and help them. You have to remember to be a passive observer."

Gordon believes, though, that it is important to involve the household in the thought process behind the experiment so the researcher won't be able to impose his/her own values on what is recorded without it being spotted.

Oliver agrees and comments: "One has to be careful that the observation has something to back it up; in other words, don't forget to ask the questions."

This is why the researcher has to be highly trained ("there are not too many of them around," Salari says) and should be trying to test a set of hypotheses or ideas to get the best results. But if such a researcher is a rarity, isn't the whole project prohibitively expensive? "I can't see many clients who are going to be able to pay so much for research. Unless they go in as a consortium of sponsors," Gordon says.

What are the prospects of home research catching the industry alight?

"I could go for the predictable and say no,"Oliver says, "but then that's what they said about mystery shopping." His company, GfK, cannot totally pooh-pooh the idea of home behaviour research in any case. The multinational is operating two controlled environments, one in Anjou in the French Loire and another in Hasslock, Germany, in which cabled households are monitored in every aspect of their purchasing life from advertising to the way a single street promotion may trigger a purchase.

Gordon believes companies are becoming increasingly open to new ways of trying to understand consumer behavior. In the end, good product and good advertising comes from an insight into how human beings behave.

"Suspect that the clients who have decided to sponsor Salari are genuinely experimental and intrigued to discover all sorts of insights," she says.

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