I am completing a Marketing minor (for non-management students) at the Desautels Faculty of Management. Having taken 4 marketing classes to date, I can safely say that I have noticed a general trend of reliance on customer survey results that warrants a considerable amount of concern. Case studies and projects are a staple of business classes. Teams comprised of around 5 students have the task of analyzing a product/service/company, identifying issues and proposing a resolution along with an implementation plan. Customer surveys are utilized in order to gain perspective on the issues at hand. Although I believe customer surveys are a great way to benchmark the general trends as perceived by consumers, I believe that students often rely too heavily on survey results and fail to realize the drawbacks of doing so.

Some pertinent background information before I present my case: the majority (I would say roughly 75%) of students in these classes are B.Comm students. The rest, similar to myself, are non-management students. Customer surveys for projects are typically created by one group member, using the online Qualtrics software. In order to gain an appropriate number of responses (teams usually aim for 100), the survey link is shared on Facebook.

Both in my own team dynamics and during class presentations, I have noticed a tendency to rely heavily on customer survey findings. When asked to back up certain implementation decisions, students often state, “results of our survey showed that this was important to customers, and that is why this policy is now in action”. This was actually the case during one marketing presentation I witnessed today. The students presented each recommendation based on customer survey ratings. In my opinion, such reliance, given the quality of the customer survey, is problematic.

More often than not, the creator of the survey has had little formal training in test creation, particularly with respect to avoiding bias in the manner in which questions are formulated. The only pre-requisite remotely related to this topic is an ‘intro to statistics’ class. Therefore, the validity of survey questions is not ensured.

As mentioned, the survey link is shared on Facebook. Therefore, the survey respondents are not likely to be representative of the target market of the product/service/company. Additionally, survey respondents have no incentive to take the time to consider each item and answer truthfully. Perhaps they are just arbitrarily filling out answers just so that their friends will stop badgering them to complete the survey. Therefore, test reliability is low.

It is illogical to base recommendations for a company almost solely on “what the customer survey told you”. I realize that school projects are of course limited in scope, and an in-depth well-constructed survey with a representative sample is unrealistic to ask for. Therefore, I propose that business students see the customer survey results as a general idea of which issues and recommendations they should zone in on. However, external sources such as industry reports and market research should hold a greater influence on the final recommendations.