Have you ever thought about using “research” as a means of entry or acceptance to make a sales pitch for your company’s product or services? If so, you might not have heard of the term sugging yet. Sugging means “selling under the guise of research,” a term used in the research industry to describe the practice of pretending to do research when in truth, the company’s goal or individual is to try and sell a product or service.
In research, the respondents’ personal details and survey answers cannot be divulged without the respondents’ consent. Whether telephone, mail, online, face-to-face, etc., the research aims to collect data to gather opinions or prove a theory. Respondents’ are not asked to buy products or services, and their information will not be given to anyone else. Meanwhile, sugging discredits the research profession because they use the pretense of survey research to gather respondents’ data to sell products directly, generate leads, or to sell to commercial third parties for further exploit.
One example of sugging is a political survey robocall campaign that was pitching a cruise line vacation to the Bahamas.
The campaign ran from Oct 2011 to July 2012. A pre-recorded message supposedly from “John at Political Opinions of America, was heard by consumers who answered the telephone call. The message told them they had been “carefully selected” to participate in a 30-second research survey, and that after the survey, they would be given the opportunity to “press one” to receive a two-day cruise to the Bahamas. Unfortunately, when the participants pressed one, they were connected to a telephone sales agent from Caribbean Cruise Line Inc. who marketed its cruise vacations. The agent also sold pre-boarding hotels, cruise tours, upgraded accommodations, and other travel bundles.
Sugging is purposely misleading consumers; that is why it is also illegal. In the example above, the Federal Trade Commission and 10 state attorney generals took action against the Florida-based cruise line company and seven other companies that assisted the fraudulent telephone survey campaign. The settling defendants were asked to pay more than $500,000 in penalties for the billions of illegal robocalls.
Two Simple Ways to Tell if the Survey is Sugging
- The company or individual conducting the survey is trying to sell a product or service.
- The customer details and survey answers are not kept private and will be used to contact the customer in the future for an individual or company to sell their products or services.
Sugging is one of the condemned survey practice by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR):
Offering products or services for sale, or using participant contacts to generate sales leads(sugging). A common practice is to gain entry or acceptance to make a sales pitch by initially defining the contact as being made for “research” purposes. This trades on the prestige of science, and it exploits the public’s willingness to reveal information about themselves in the interest to further our research. In some cases, questions establish respondents’ susceptibility to sales pressure or their interest in some product or service. Follow-up contacts are then made to those so identified, all under the guise of “research”.
In doing your market research, the privacy of your consumers should be treated with the utmost respect. Sugging is misleading and, in no case, considered legitimate or an acceptable element of professionally conducted research. Condemn sugging and avoid a possible embarrassing, as well as an expensive lawsuit in the future.
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