Good Perspective on Question Wording

Submitted by Blue Leader on Sun, 01/25/2009 - 17:47

From an extensive New Yorker article on movie marketing:

Executives’ testing stories take divergent paths to the same punch line. Either they decided not to tamper with a “Pulp Fiction,” despite testing results invariably described as “the lowest scores in the studio’s history,” or they were confounded when an “Akeelah and the Bee” faltered commercially despite “the highest scores in the studio’s history.” In both scenarios, the numbers lied. “Testing is a sham,” one marketing consultant says. “All you’ve learned is what people thought of a movie they didn’t have to pay for. It does not mean they’re going to go pay for it.”

Read the whole thing; it's got a lot of interesting details about the guts of marketing.

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