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Cognitive biases, such as availability bias, can influence your decisions in subtle but significant ways. Unlike factual reasoning, availability heuristics makes you lean heavily on easily recalled information.
In market research, this bias can distort the findings, where the objective is to gather unbiased customer opinions. Understanding and identifying this bias can help you take steps to ensure your market research data provides an accurate account of customer preferences and behaviors, enabling you to make informed decisions.
Availability heuristic or bias is a type of cognitive bias where individuals give more significance to the information that they can easily recall. This leads to people heavily relying on recent or impactful memories rather than considering relevant data/facts.
Ease of recall, emotional impact, recency effect, and frequency all contribute to this bias. Media influence and personal experience are two examples of the impact of availability bias in everyday life.
In a world where customers consume information from social media, the Internet, podcasts, and news, availability bias has become a major factor in misinformation. This harms business decisions.
A research found that 61% of companies make customer experience improvement decisions based on customer feedback influenced by recent interactions rather than a comprehensive analysis.
Here are a few ways availability heuristics skew market research findings.
Respondents may recall recent/dramatic experiences more easily, which can lead to a biased memory. This can reflect on their response to your market research, skew the data, and result in misrepresented market trends.
For example, if a retailer conducting market research heavily advertises a newly launched product, it might influence the respondents’ opinion of the memorable incident.
When respondents share feedback influenced by recent events, it can lead to a misinterpretation of consumer preferences. Companies might make business decisions based on biased data, which can lead to misalignment with actual market needs.
Respondents may overreport a purchase or overvalue a need, leading to an inaccurate understanding of consumer behavioral habits. For example, a customer who recently purchased some home decor may overreport their need for home decor products, skewing a retailer’s insight into its customer behavior.
A positive or negative experience can disproportionately influence a respondent’s perception of the brand. This can lead to an inaccurate evaluation of the overall brand perception.
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Availability bias can distort findings, leading to misguided business decisions. Here, we’ll identify some common signs of this bias.
If you conduct a survey right after a music concert and gather an overwhelmingly positive response, this may be due to the recency of the music concert than the actual customer experience.
If a financial institute is surveying its customers after a recent economic issue, the respondents might over-emphasize a particular emotion influenced by the recent event rather than their overall financial behavior.
Data showing a sudden spike or drop in trends without a logical explanation can be a good identification of availability bias. For example, a sudden increase in gluten-free diets might be attributed to the media coverage rather than a genuine health concern.
Also read: Biased Survey Questions
Now that we have learned how to identify availability heuristics in market research data let’s explore three ways you can prevent this bias from negatively impacting your research findings.
Implement random sampling techniques when selecting a survey sample. This method will ensure that you are surveying a balanced demography of a diverse and representative sample. It allows you to minimize the influence of recent events and avoid overrepresentation.
Design survey flow using randomization and skip logic to reduce order effect, mitigate recency, and increase focus on relevant information.
Availability bias can skew market research data. Recognizing and mitigating this bias is essential to gathering reliable and accurate insights for informed decision-making. By addressing the availability heuristic, you can create an accurate and comprehensive view of your target market and develop a more effective business process.
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