Marketing·
A raffle where everyone wins costs you a box of small gifts. What it buys is the kind of customer survey a company would otherwise hire a research firm to run.
The prize is what you give away. The survey is what you keep.
Three questions, and no more
Nobody fills out a survey while standing at a booth, unless it is part of a game they are already playing. Even then, keep it short. Three questions, multiple choice, one screen. That is the ceiling.
But the three do not have to be the same three for everyone. Rotate them from a larger bank, and three questions per person becomes a dozen questions across the crowd.
Every business needs different answers
Here are some examples.
What would you expect this to cost? Offer three price points. A few hundred taps give you a real willingness-to-pay curve, which is the most expensive answer on this list to get any other way.
What are you using now? Your competitive map, drawn by actual customers instead of by a report.
What is not working about it? The most valuable question here. People answer plainly, because the gift is already theirs and being polite buys them nothing.
What almost stopped you from buying ours? Aimed at the people who walked past your shelf. Their hesitation is your next headline.
Which of these two labels do you prefer? Put both on the screen. Over a weekend that is a design vote with hundreds of ballots, settled before you pay for a print run.
Describe it in one word. The only free-text box worth including. Their words make better ad copy than yours.
If your visitors are buyers rather than shoppers, swap in their version: how many stores do you run, what margin do you need, what is the slowest mover in this category on your shelf right now.
Turning the answers into decisions
Sort before you count. The same answer from a shopper and from a buyer who runs thirty stores does not carry the same weight, and averaging them together hides both.
Then cross the questions against each other. The people who named your biggest competitor, what did they say was not working? The ones who accepted the highest price, what did they say mattered most? A total tells you what the room thinks. A crossing tells you which customer to do something about.
Keep their exact words. When forty people describe the same problem with the same phrase, that phrase belongs on your packaging, and it will outperform anything written for you.
Then reach a conclusion. Not a summary of the answers, but a decision drawn from them: what you will do differently, or keep doing, because of what they said.
Keep the questions for next time. Ask them again at the next show, and the answers become a comparison that tells you whether the change you made worked.
What the box of gifts actually bought
Real answers to the questions you chose to ask. Not guesses, and not one loud opinion at the booth, but the same questions put to the right people, one after another.
If you want one of these built for your next show, that is the work I do: the game, the question bank, and the prize inventory sitting behind it.