A friend asked me to proof her application to appear on a reality show, and there are a disproportionate number of questions about one’s experience working in marketing. She has an advertising background and doesn’t want to be automatically disqualified as a result. However, she also says she’s seen plenty of people with marketing backgrounds on the shows she’s watched. There aren’t specific questions about other fields, so I assume that there’s something about marketing that the producers are trying to weed out. What is it and why?
She also says the same thing is true of telephone surveys. She’ll answer a bunch of their questions, but when she responds to, “Are you employed in a marketing-related field” affirmatively, the surveyor says Thank you and hangs up.
I don’t know about reality shows. I know we screen out marketing/advertising professionals from surveys and other market research because they don’t answer questions the way others would.
They may know a lot about how market research works and that affects their answers. Sometimes, knowing why a question is asked affects your answer. Even if they’re not familiar with research, they still answer many questions differently. For example, if you ask a general consumer about perceptions of different brands, he will answer differently from someone who works in branding. The latter may recognize that company X is trying to build an upscale image and will answer based on his own perceptions of how well they’ve executed that campaign. Then there’s always the possibility that some of their work is connected with a competitor and the responder may try to mess up your results or report on your efforts to their employer or client.
We also screen out people who work in the same or related industries for those reasons.