Two days ago I participated in a marketing study. I’d done it once two years ago—three hours in a conference room in the nicest hotel around, rating all kinds of things on a scale of one to ten, and in the end they give you $75. They don’t tell you what the thing is for beforehand. Last time it was credit card reward programs. This time it was three new kinds of tortillas. We watched commercials and participated in taste tests. Overall, both were pretty fun, mostly because it’s interesting seeing how the other half lives. (That is, people who make lots of money by shoving their souls under a rug in the corner). It’s also fun to apply Dorothy Sayers’ disclaimer in Murder Must Advertise to the particular people running it.
We started off rating our feelings about different brands of tortillas in ridiculous detail. How can tortillas be sophisticated or innovative? (Innovative jockeyed against versatile as the word of the night.) And even worse, how can one brand be more so? Most of the brands were complete blanks for me—I remember thinking of one “Gosh, they were really scraping the barrel here—if this brand even exists, it’s got to be in the Spanish-speakers-only stores.” Yesterday I went to the store and noticed the corn tortillas I used to buy in the good old gluten-free days—and it was that exact brand! Ah well, they never asked how observant I was.
Letting a tortilla company show you ads is like letting your date sneak his arm around you—before you know it, you’re a lot more familiar than you might have liked. Because of this, I knew that if I went to the store and couldn’t find my favorite cheap tortilla store-brand ($0.99 for 20), I would probably look around forlornly until I saw the next most familiar brand (the advertised one), and if I couldn’t see the price tag ($1.59 for 12), I would probably buy them. (Yes, I do have grocery prices memorized.) So every time they asked me how I felt about their brand after seeing the commercial, I gave them one point above perfectly neutral. Unfortunately, they interpreted this as getting to first-base.
They alternated questions about tortillas with questions about how we viewed ourselves. We were asked whether we liked change (100% no), were exciting (100% no), were spenders or savers (at the moment, neither), and so on. It was nice to have a break from trying to figure out to what degree the products advertised in the commercial fit with my image of the brand (Damn it, all I think is that their tortillas are a little softer than the cheap ones while being extremely expensive!) and instead answer questions about myself. But then there was the group of questions asking “Do adults ask you about [fill in the blank] more than other adults you know?” Options included vacation spots (Trans-Siberian Railroad!), makeup and toiletries (Don’t use anti-bacterial soap!), childcare and babies (I thought about this a lot as a child…), business (Er, well, business is for sucks), etc. But the question didn’t ask me whether I had good advice, just whether people asked me for it. And I realized that I’d been giving a lot of advice without waiting to be asked for it. I had to push “Never” for every question other than “Food preparation and recipes.” It was one of those moments when the veil between the self and the image of self is stripped away, and you have to stare at the drooping flesh under fluorescent lights.
At the end we were given the opportunity to give our opinions. This portion of the credit card market study had released untold animosity from the participants (there were 100 of us, evenly split between men and women). This time there were only 60 of us, and we were all women. The experiences were vastly different. In many ways this was a far nicer group to be in. Everyone was trying to be polite and considerate. There was a huge desire to affirm and be affirmed. However, the atmosphere became redolent of hurt feelings when “Why did you like this commercial?” was followed with “Why didn’t you?” And then there were the emotions.
We had been asked to circle five words that best described what we had felt while watching the commercial. Horrors! Really, all I’d felt was 1. interested to see what kind of shenanigans they were up to and 2. neither repulsed nor excited by a commercial that struck me as 100% predictable but inoffensive. The commercials didn’t give me any of the information needed to know if these tortillas really were good for you (96% fat free? What’s replacing the fat? That’s 4% fat—what percent fat are regular tortillas? That’s far more fat than regular bread.) “Interested” wasn’t even on the list. Instead there were things like “sympathetic,” “accepted,” “loved,” “understood,” “eager,” and my favorite, “in awe.” There were also the corresponding negative emotions. 95% of the emotions on the list were ones that only the high and low points of my life have excited. They certainly weren’t accessible to TV commercials. But, I thought, these poor folks have a whole page to fill with words—who can blame them for reaching?
But the tortillas were being marketed as healthy (with a hint of better-for-you-than-bread, though of course they couldn’t say that, since it isn’t true) and good for your family. The ladies seemed to have run the gamut of positive emotions, and were overflowing in their approval of a company that cares for the health of their families, and listens to its customers (them). Of course, there was even less reason to think that the company cared about the health of their families than there was for thinking the tortillas were healthy. Not that the CEO would go out of his way to run your child down with his limo. They were just a normal company which saw that the low-carb fad could be turned to their advantage since tortillas are generally thought to have less carbs than bread. They actually have quite a bit more—a burrito sized tortilla is about the same as three slices of bread.
The fact that these ladies felt so strongly about the welfare of their families was really good. Good for children, good for husbands, good for women, good for society. But the way that these good emotions were played upon with no resistance from the rational faculty was appalling—the commercial seemed to have come within a toucher of home-base with many of the participants. I sat in my chair, shocked. All I could think was, “Good lord, these people should not have the vote.”
Most people require a solid education to develop their rational faculty (I did and do!) And most women do not receive it. Degrees in mathematics and the sciences tend to develop this faculty, and most women do not go into these fields (a degree in traditional liberal arts is, of course, best.) And so the problem could just be one of education. Unfortunately I won’t have the opportunity to see what an all-male market study would be like. But I feel far more shaken than I even have been before regarding women's suffrage, and if I’d been asked to vote on it at that moment, I would have voted the right away.
