The recruiter sent the screener over yesterday and I read it twice on the back steps while the light went orange. Fifteen questions. Clean skip logic. Terminate on industry employment, terminate on recent study participation, terminate on the usual. Then, sitting politely at question nine like it had nothing to hide: must have purchased in the last six months.
Which quietly deletes everybody who left.
I have approved that question. More than once, at more than one agency, usually late on a Friday when the fielding window was closing and I wanted the recruit to go smoothly. It does go smoothly. Happy people show up on time, they answer in full sentences, they say generous things about the packaging. The client reads the topline and feels understood, and eight weeks later we are all building a positioning for people who were never going anywhere.
Research that samples only the people who stayed is not a study of your category, it is an expensive record of your own survivorship bias.
So I sent the screener back with three changes. One, a hard quota: eight of the twenty-four respondents have to be people who bought and then stopped, with a reason they can name out loud. Two, that group gets its own discussion guide, because asking a former customer what they would like to see improved turns the session into a suggestion box, while asking them to walk through the last time they bought something else in the category gets you the actual story. Three, we sort the anger before we report it.
Disappointed and betrayed are not the same finding. Disappointed means the product underdelivered, and product can fix product. Betrayed means the promise and the experience came apart somewhere, and that is a brand problem, and no amount of new flavor SKUs or a refreshed secondary palette will touch it. Meal kit companies have been learning this expensively for years, optimizing the front door while the churn cohort sits entirely outside the research design.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The loyalists tell you the brand is warm and trustworthy and a little indulgent. The people who quit tell you it was lovely until the third month and then it was one more thing to cancel on a Sunday night. Only one of those sentences changes what you do next.
Recruit the angry ones first, while the budget still has room and nobody has fallen in love with a slide.
Which quietly deletes everybody who left.
Truffles has never purchased anything in her life. Barnaby has churned out of four separate food brands without once telling me why, and I would give a great deal for twenty minutes and a discussion guide.