Joe Lamantia.com

I got caught in an on-line opin­ion sur­vey trap last week. The setup: In exchange for 10% off my next pur­chase, a Banana Repub­lic cashier told me, I had to answer a few ques­tions about my shop­ping expe­ri­ence. Retail­ers often solicit opin­ions from cus­tomers in return for a vari­ety of rewards. It’s com­mon enough that there’s an under­stand­ing on the amount of infor­ma­tion requested, in exchange for the expected reward. So I thought I was safe…
Twenty screens later, after answer­ing more than fifty ques­tions and with no end in sight, I was feel­ing a lit­tle cranky. Even my wife was irri­tated; I was hold­ing up gro­cery shop­ping for din­ner guests. Very quickly, the reward for my time shifted from a coupon, to using Banana Repub­lic as an exam­ple of an on-line sur­vey expe­ri­ence that under­mines your brand.
The full sur­vey ran more than thirty five screens, and ended with an error mes­sage. Very pro­fes­sional.
Thumb­nails of the whole sur­vey:

For kicks, I posted the screen­shots to Flickr. If you run the slideshow, you can see where I became frus­trated and started to give spoiler answers — like wear­ing a size 98, or spend­ing $10 / year on cloth­ing.
Why was the sur­vey expe­ri­ence bad?
1. They didn’t make clear how much time they were ask­ing for. The open­ing screen said 10 min­utes, this is mis­lead­ing for a 100 ques­tion sur­vey. If you’re ask­ing for my time, respect me enough to be hon­est about what’s required.
2. They didn’t make the real pur­pose of the sur­vey clear. From the shop­ping expe­ri­ence itself, the ques­tions quickly shifted to my age, income, mar­i­tal sta­tus, and edu­ca­tion level. This is a trans­par­ent attempt to feed data min­ing and demo­graphic needs that relied on an ama­teur segue to turn the con­ver­sa­tion around and ask for per­sonal infor­ma­tion.
3. They con­tra­dicted the expe­ri­ence I had in their store. The store staff were nice enough to keep track of the umbrella I left in a fit­ting room, and return it before I left, which was thought­ful. Con­sis­tency is the core of a suc­cess­ful brand, but the sur­vey expe­ri­ence was incon­sis­tent.
How does this dam­age Banana Republic’s brand?
1. Banana Repub­lic left me with a series of neg­a­tive impres­sions that work against their brand val­ues: I now feel I was cho­sen to par­tic­i­pate in a sur­vey under false pre­tenses, a sur­vey that offers me lit­tle value in return for impor­tant per­sonal infor­ma­tion that is inap­pro­pri­ate to ask for in the first place.
2. Banana Repub­lic closed a grow­ing chan­nel for con­duct­ing busi­ness with a cus­tomer. I may pur­chase more from their stores — if I have no other retailer at hand, and I need busi­ness clothes to meet with a client CEO the next morn­ing once again — but I’m cer­tainly not will­ing to engage with them online.
Mer­chants in all areas of retail­ing work very hard to encour­age cus­tomers to form pos­i­tive asso­ci­a­tions with their brands. Fash­ion retail­ers work espe­cially hard at encour­ag­ing cus­tomers to asso­ciate val­ues, such as trust and respect, with a brand because these val­ues serve as the foun­da­tion for longer term and more lucra­tive rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers than sin­gle pur­chases. Every expe­ri­ence a cus­tomer has with your brand — every touch point — influ­ences this net­work of asso­ci­a­tions, rein­forc­ing or weak­en­ing the link between a brand and the feel­ings that cus­tomers have about the prod­ucts and the com­pany behind it. A sim­ple test any retailer should use when con­sid­er­ing bring­ing an expe­ri­ence to cus­tomers is wether the expe­ri­ence will rein­force the right brand asso­ci­a­tions.
Loy­alty pro­grams, and their off­spring the online opin­ion sur­vey, are good exam­ples of the inter­sec­tions of cus­tomer inter­ests and retailer inter­ests in an expe­ri­ence that can rein­force a customer’s per­cep­tions of the brand and the val­ues asso­ci­ated with it. Many retail­ers man­age these kinds of pro­grams well.
Just not Banana Repub­lic.
The error mes­sage at the end.
Error Mes­sage:

I wear size 98:
Size 98: