A book about response bias, search listening and gaining consumer insights from big datasets.

Listening to an audience or publics is a critical of element of marketing and public relations practice. It’s rightly a growing area of significant investment.

Identifying an audience and understanding its motivation is critical to planning and engagement. It informs strategy, media and content.

But what do you do if people don’t tell the truth? They typically don’t. People tell pollsters and market researchers what they think they want to hear.

I’ve started dry January this month and signed up to the Try Dry app from Alcohol Change UK. It coaches you to reduce your alcohol consumption with daily nudges and rewards.

The app asked me to submit data about my drinking habits. When I entered my data, I reduced my actual alcohol consumption by approximately a quarter.

Even when asked for data anonymously in the privacy of our own home we modify our response to present the best version of ourselves, or at least the version we think that others expect.

This effect is called response bias. It goes someway to explaining why pollsters call elections wrong, notably the Brexit vote in the UK in 2016, and President Donald Trump’s US election success late the same year.

It’s the basis of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. If you’re interested in the growing use of data in business, science, or politics you should read this book.

Stephens-Davidowitz suggests that Google provides a means to obtain an accurate insight into consumer behaviour.

People share their deepest fears and secrets with the Google search box. This behavioural trait combined with the sheer volume of data, so called big data, creates a useful source of insight into the human condition. It’s a growing area of psychology and social science.

The Google dataset is accessible to marketing and PR practitioners via autocomplete data using tools such as AnswerThePublic, and search volumes using the Google Trends and Google Ads Keyword Planner.

It has led to an emerging marketing and PR discipline called search listening. Indeed, it’s the subject of a book by Sophie Coley called Consumer Insight in the Age of Google and the basis of her Search Listening consulting and training business.

Stephens-Davidowitz uses Google data to explore attitudes to mental health, parenting, race, reproduction, sex and more. The book is written for an American audience but it’s application and insight are global.

The book isn’t limited to the Google dataset. Stephens-Davidowitz describes how insights can be discovered in any large data set. He explores datasets related to the economy, population, educational attainment, sports and more.

In the final chapter Stephens-Davidowitz shares a study of Amazon Kindle comments that provide insight into the number of readers that complete non-fiction books. You’ll have to read the book for yourself to discover the answer.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Bloomsbury Publishing (April 2018)