By Kim Storer
Stories from the Field
What key won’t open any door?
A turkey!
[Tweet this bad joke!]
Why did the turkey cross the road?
It was the chicken’s day off!
[Tweet this bad joke!]
Where do you find a turkey with no legs?
Exactly where you left it!
[Tweet this bad joke!]
What do you call it when it rains turkeys?
Foul weather!
[Tweet this bad joke!]
Have you had enough of bad turkey jokes yet? We sure have!
We often tell our clients that we love to take on projects with the most complicated or awkward logistics. Many times, they chuckle and move forward with relatively simple box, pack, and, and mail studies. Other times, however, they accept the challenge. Or should I say, WE accept the challenge.
And that is how our repertoire of bad turkey jokes expanded in just a few days.
Our client needed to conduct an in-home-usage test (IHUT) with a second physical recontact for frozen turkeys. They wanted to learn how people handled the turkeys, how they cooked them, how they presented the cooked product at the table, and various other aspects of food preparation.
We actually could have mailed huge frozen turkeys to people’s homes from Halifax to Vancouver, and Niagara-on-the-Lake to Iqaluit, but the postage for a 20 pound box would have been at least $30 per turkey. Instead, we conducted a central location recruit, in this case, using our head office in Toronto. And for food safety reasons, we couldn’t simply accept a few hundred frozen turkeys at our loading dock. Given that complication, we arranged to bring numerous freezers into our office and filled every empty office and meeting room with them. We had to explain to every client coming by that, no, we don’t usually have five deep freezers to hold our summer popsicles!
With the freezers in place and the turkeys separated by size by freezer, we invited the target audience of pre-screened consumers to visit our office and physically accept a frozen turkey to bring home. The turkey jokes began!
Even better, since the client wanted to give people two opportunities to test the product, people seemed to take the opportunity between picking up their first and their second turkey to learn a few more jokes to share with us.
In the end, though, the study was a great success. It generated one of the highest enjoyment scores and one of the highest completion rates we’ve seen across the various products we’ve tested. The turkeys themselves were a great incentive, and people were happy to participate and share their opinions. And we enjoyed making a complex project look simple.
If you have a turkey joke, we’d love to hear it – maybe! Please get in touch with us!
