A case study in the South Korean market serves as a stark warning: when you attempt to fix a systemic flaw with a tactical bribe, you re-engineer the respondent’s behavior in ways you never considered.
The Problem: In South Korea, average survey conversions frequently sit between 1% and 3%, often paired with extreme lengths of interview (60+ minutes). The predictable result was massive panel attrition.
The Tactical Fix: To stem the bleeding, panel managers began offering incentives for “Terminations” and “Quota Fulls.” The logic was simple: compensate the user for their time, even if they didn’t qualify, to keep them from leaving the panel, thus increasing the available time to make up for acquisition cost.
The Unintended Consequence: Respondents are rational economic actors. They quickly realized that guessing a disqualifying answer in the first 30 seconds was more profitable than laboring through a 60-minute study.
By incentivizing the outcome of a termination, the managers effectively trained their panel to actively seek disqualification. The “retention” metric was saved, but the “conversion” and “data integrity” metrics were sacrificed. And recruitment ROI suffered in the process.
The Takeaway: Be surgically careful about what you incentivize. Behavior follows the money. If your system rewards failure, your users will become experts at failing, proving once again that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.