The camera never lies...

...but lots of people do, especially when they’re talking to researchers or otherwise responding to surveys. A part of it might be attributable to the Lake Wobegon effect, from the mythical town of Garrison Keillor, where it is said all the children are above average. More technically, another driver is social desirability bias. This is where the respondent wants to provide an answer that will be looked at by others as favorable.

• A recent poll asked Americans who they voted for in the last election. This poll showed Obama thrashing McCain by more than 20 percentage points -- far greater than the actual Obama margin of victory on Election Day.

• When people are asked if they voted in a presidential election, the percentage of self-reported turnout is inevitably 10-20 percent higher than actual turnout.

• About 40 percent of Americans say that they attend church regularly. Counting and tracking methodologies used to determine true church attendance found that about half that number can actually be found in the pews.

• A number of years ago, a survey found that upwards of five million people claimed to be New Yorker magazine readers—an unlikely number given that circulation was barely above half a million.

People want to be on the winning team, and want to look virtuous and smart. So when we ask them to self-report, we often get responses that are wildly inaccurate. Researchers are exploring tools such as anonymous online polling and expressionless computer avatars in order to obtain more accurate survey results. But no matter how sophisticated surveys become, there is no substitute for the careful capture of actual human behavior, as we do with video-enabled behavioral analytics to see into the realities of shoppers in the shopping aisles.

As Yogi Berra once said, “You can see a lot by observing.”

Can we do an MRI in Aisle 11?

Ron writes: The search for the perfect predictor of advertising effectiveness continues. According to a recent story in the New York Times, a Yale undergraduate is using magnetic resource imaging to “study brain waves and determine why people respond to some advertisements but not others.”

Emily Yudofsky became curious about the potential of neuromarketing in high school, when she worked in a laboratory that did research on the consumer response to Coke vs. Pepsi. Yudofsky’s neuromarketing company will specialize in research on public service advertising, hoping to develop anti-smoking or don’t-drink-and-drive campaigns.

The article suggests neuromarketing is “tremendously controversial,” both because it is seen as “creepy” and, as scientists point out, “just because a neuron fires does not mean a consumer likes Coke better than Pepsi.” If neuromarketing is indeed effective, we will see it used for more commercial applications. It is tempting to believe that brain scans can provide a complete understanding of how consumers make decisions. However, no matter how refined this technology gets, it won’t be a substitute for the observation of behavior and the resulting insights that bring true understanding of the consumer. At least not yet.

In the trenches

Bill writes: Best Buy’s incoming CEO Brian Dunn started with the company 24 years ago as a salesman, and in some ways never left his roots. He still spends a great deal of his time on the sales floor, “where the rubber meets the road,” he says (see Wall Street Journal article “Best Buy Confronts Newer Nemesis,” March 16). In his quest to now differentiate Best Buy from competitors Wal-Mart and Amazon.com (now that Circuit City is history), Dunn has used a series of store visits to provide inspiration.

In the olden days of shopkeeping, owners minded their stores at all hours and lived upstairs when the lights were out. Nothing got past them since they were always there. In a world of multi-unit retailing, bosses are far removed from the action of the floor, often held hostage in meetings to consider new companywide dental plans and how to defer equity awards. Still, they take it as an article of faith there’s no substitute for being in the trenches, and “make time” to do store visits as often as they can.

While Brian Dunn’s efforts should be applauded, there may well be a limit to how much inspiration can occur when a CEO makes a guest appearance. Certainly there is value in talking with the troops, where good ideas might arise and unaddressed problems can surface. At the same time, these are all too often staged as goodwill/PR events to rally the troops, and the real value back to the CEO is diminished. One legitimate substitute for management’s inability to be in stores all the time is the use of video-enabled behavioral analytics, which provides a volumetric assessment of how shoppers use the stores and what are the effects of the experience the employees provide. It’s an interesting way to fuel inspiration and find out what’s really happening with thousands of customer actions, interactions, and transactions, when you can’t be everywhere—or anywhere—at once.

On second thought, bring back the lasers

Ron writes: Getting a hard count of how many people pass through New York’s Times Square every day is an important measure for a number of commercial interests—setting retail rents and outdoor advertising rates most particularly. According to this article in the New York Times, the Times Square Alliance pays $100,000 a year for a team of Russian immigrants who are paid $8 an hour to count the masses. The NYT reports that high-tech gadgets such as video recordings, vertical cameras, and even lasers have been considered, but that the immense volume of traffic overwhelms the technology. Instead, the human tide is counted by “dozens of Russian immigrants armed with clipboards, folding chairs and counters.”

Still, the low tech hand clicker approach employed by the Russians doesn’t work perfectly either. According to one of the counters, “When people walk en masse, it’s useless.” So when Times Square is most crowded, and counting accuracy is most important, the low tech method breaks down, too.

Having worked with many companies to help them understand customer traffic and behaviors, I know the best results come from employing both higher tech solutions such as video cameras, along with a low-tech, more labor-intensive approach. Perhaps if the Times Square Alliance employed this one-two punch, they would be able to get true head-count fidelity.

Even so, the most crucial assessments would still elude them—like how many people are actually stopping into the stores and buying, and who and how many are actually looking at the billboards. Those are the numbers worth real money.