BBC Gets Consumer Feedback Through Personality Quiz

The BBC have taken an interesting approach to consumer feedback.

At https://www.bbcsurvey.co.uk/ users are able to go and take part in a quiz that claims to allow you to “be able to discover which BBC personality best fits you.”

The quiz is quite clearly an attempt at getting customer feedback on how often they consume BBC media, what they think of the BBC and which types of media they use most. At the end you’re given a personality percentage, which seems to be split between Sherlock Holmes, David Mitchell, and a Dalek, with a complimentary generic summary to accompany it.

A lot of people seem to be being told that they’re 40% Sherlock, 30% David and 30% Dalek, including me, with a summary ironically proclaiming them to be individualistic, so I doubt the test is particularly accurate. Still, the funny triple Polaroid you get of Holmes, Mitchell and Dalek is amusing enough to be worth that minute of your time if you’re bored.

What’s interesting about this is how the BBC have embraced interactive media in order to get consumer feedback. Instead of asking a standard questionnaire that nobody cares about they’ve designed it as a personality quiz, giving the reader an incentive and reward for taking part. The trick is that these tests get promoted by social media as people post their results to Facebook and Twitter – which is where I heard about this – and others take the test themselves to see what they get. Not only do people who wouldn’t have been bothered to take part do so, but people who would’ve never known about it will give feedback too.

Think about it. Would you rather do a survey that ends in ‘thank you’ or a survey that tells you you’re 30% Dalek? It’s a smart strategy.

While sneaking in consumer feedback questions in these sorts of tests is nothing new, the BBC test is the first one I’ve seen in recent memory to be so obvious about it. Maybe they’re just really bad at being sneaky, but it is refreshing to feel like you’re not trying to be deceived.

Then again, I’m only speculating on this. Maybe it’s just a really, really bad personality quiz. If that’s the case, we can all get a good laugh over how the BBC believe that David Mitchell is only 30% David Mitchell.

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