You’re scrolling through your feed and you come across one of our market research projects that grabs your attention.‘We’re looking for women aged 18-65, to take part in a 60-minute online focus group. Receive a beauty product to trial and £60 for participating’.

It sounds great and you fit the requirements, so you fill out the online form which takes you a few minutes. Hit send and then nothing. Tumbleweed. Days turn into weeks and another project pops up which sounds just as enticing. This time around you’re hesitant to fill in the form again, as it seems for some reason you weren’t picked.

Here’s why; For every project we get, we are given a certain set of ‘inclusion criteria’ from the client. And it’s vital we stick to that criteria to make sure the right people are taking part in the market research. If we weren’t to stick to the rules this would invalidate the research project… But you do fit the requirements for the project, so why weren’t you picked?

Here’s the tricky part; When we promote the project, we can only ask for basic information so as not to give away the topic of the research. So we might ask for students aged 18-65 or parents who live in Wales; whilst our client may be looking for students who didn’t finish their degree or parents with three children. But we have to remain incognito, so as not to give the game away.

Why? Truthfully? It’s because there are lots of people who would be happy to change their details, to make themselves more suitable for the project, in order to get the money incentive. Crazy I know. But in doing this the research results then become skewed and inaccurate. 

 In filling out the initial online form, we are able to assess whether or not you could be the right fit for the research project.  Sometimes someone could be a fit for the majority of projects. Sometimes it can take a while before we find the perfect project for you. But we can only give you a follow-up call if you meet the initial criteria. On some occasions, we do also get a high number of applicants and so if you meet the criteria but we have filled those spaces by the time we get down to that entry we cannot book you on that time around. It’s always worth applying because every project is unique, with a different set of criteria.

I hope that this has shed a little more light on the process of things on our side and that you’ll keep applying so that we can get you along to one of our projects soon.