Mystery Shopping Jobs

Imagine that your in-laws are coming to stay for a weekend. Do you stack the empty fridge with brands you would never dream of buying to impress them? Perhaps you finally get around to the spring cleaning - in November. Now imagine a complete stranger is coming to stay, not just for the weekend, but for two weeks. And instead of being under the scrutiny of your eagle-eyed in-laws, the stranger will be bringing a video camera to record your every movement.

This will soon become reality for selected households who take part (for a basic fee) in a novel project due to be launched by the advertising agency BMP DDB, under the auspices of its new behavioral research unit, the Culture Lab.

The brainchild of the unit's head, Siamack Salari, the project - which has been several months in development - will monitor the activity of 12 households over a six-month period. For two weeks, a researcher, who will stay in a spare room, will painstakingly record the activities of various members of the households as they prepare meals, curl up in front of the television and compile shopping lists.

Salary has already snapped up five fmcg companies to take part in the study which, it is hoped, will yield a wealth of information about the way consumers live and breathe a brand. The research goes a step beyond another observational technique - mystery shopping jobs- which has burgeoned as a widely used mechanism after years of leading a rather undercover existence.

Salari, who used to undertake mystery shopping research at J. Walter Thompson, says the experiment represents the closest companies will get to opening up consumers heads. “Observing people making decisions in shops is only the tip of the iceberg,� he says. “What interests me is that the behavior and choices manifested in the store must be hugely influenced by what is happening inside the home.�

The project isn't running yet but fans and detractors are already lining up. “The challenge will be to get the study quantified,� Merry Baskin, head of planning at JWT, says. “If you have 12 households and 12 different types of families, you can't really draw conclusions. The project would have to run for a long time.�

“It's a fascinating project, but not really statistically enumerative,� Alan Wilson, a director at MindShare, adds.

A list of numbers is not necessarily what research is about, argues Wendy Gordon, formerly at the Research Business but now a partner at her own strategic consultancy, the Fourth Room. “The industry has come a long way in the past five years. Companies are aware that the old scenario in which eight people sat talking in a room for a few hours gives one perspective only. That's because the people have been taken out of their natural environment and been put in a sanitized one. They are out of context.�

This observation comes closest to what Salari says he is setting out to do. “There is a great difference between what people say they do and what they actually do. For instance, one woman claimed she shared the task of washing- up equally with her husband. But in their home, we found out that the husband just sat around on the sofa and never did the washing-up.�

Mystery Shopping |