Opinion & Exit Polls - Learning for MR agencies

This is the election season in many key states like Tamilnadu, Kerala, West Bengal, and Assam, apart from Puducherry UT. The election commission is going about operating the huge election machinery, driving the bureaucracy to ensure free and fair elections. Best wishes to them.

All political parties, who have stakes in these states, are busy with election campaigning, spending enormous energy and resources in the process and making elections a high risk / high return affair. Our best wishes to them.

All voters, whose well being is dependent on those who get elected, are going about their routine, without showing any reactions. He/She commits his/her vote to every candidate, who approaches him/her for his/her votes, without betraying any emotion. He/She sure knows what he/she will do come the election day. Our best wishes to him/her too.

Between the political parties (who are sellers of product, in a sense) and the voters (who are customers of the product), there are print, visual and digital media, who help in reaching the communication from political parties to the voters. The readership and viewership grow significantly during the election season for these media organizations, making them richer in the process. Our best wishes to them.

Come elections, we also have various research agencies, collaborating with media organizations, get busy with an exercise called ‘Opinion poll’. These opinion polls are generally controversial, as they always predict one party or other to win the elections and sometimes, predict hung assembly too. The ‘winners’ of these polls invariably welcome the results and the ‘losers’ of these opinion polls always reject these polls, questioning the methodology of the research and attributing bias by the media or the research agency.

While this is understandable, what is beyond comprehension is that these opinion polls almost always go horribly wrong, when the actual election results are announced. In spite of this, these research and media agencies continue to conduct these polls shamelessly. While they claim sample size to be in thousands, I have never come across anyone, who has participated in such polls. There is always a suspicion that such studies are basically desk work, with pre decided results. As marketers, we have seen some of the well-known market research agencies, who supposedly outsource the field work to smaller local agencies, end up getting fudged up primary data. A similar modus operandi is suspected with opinion polls too. At times, one gets lucky to get the results right. But it is sheet luck, nothing else. But there is money to be made in two ways. One is straight forward TRP / readership increase, leading to higher advertisement revenue. The second one is money paid by the ‘winners’ of these opinion polls, to influence the same. It is a win-win game either way.

Then, there is this ‘exit poll’. These exit polls supposedly involve field work outside polling booths, collation of data, applying statistical tools and then interpreting the same. What is incredible is that these ‘exit poll’ results are announced almost immediately on completion of voting. In spite of paying huge fee by corporates, the market research agencies have never been so swift to get the output done. It is time the market research agencies learn a trick or two from these ‘exit poll’ agencies to make the research process faster. Anyway, all research studies are dependent on luck factor to get the results right. At least, make them faster.