Market Research Politics

‘We’ve received reports of a suspicious individual conducting surveys and photographing people’s boarding passes around Terminal 2 of Domestic Airport.’ Two Federal police officers approached me. Both are Anglo-Australian men almost twice my size, bulky with weapons and other equipment buckled to their vests. I look up at them, wide-eyed with five Samsung tablets on my lap and a Woolworths bag on the seat beside. I hold up my company tag which has my full name above a mugshot, then throw up every proof of legitimacy I have prepared: a letter of authority, my driver’s licence, photocopy of my passport, the team leader’s mobile number, fieldwork office number. This is not the first time I have been treated as a security risk.

Market research fieldwork is a solitary job that appears eccentric to outsiders. For efficiency and methodological soundness, my company assigns only one fieldworker to complete observational tasks (e.g., cleanliness checks, customer tracking) or face-to-face customer surveys at a location at any time, isolating employees from one another. During observational data-collection, I have photographed everything in public during peak hour at Sydney’s busiest stations, from squashed chips and bird poo to ripped condoms and graffitied instructions like a phone number with ‘Call for sex’ written above.

During shifts conducting customer satisfaction surveys, I am a public nuisance at best; at worst, I am a security risk. I saunter under Pyrmont Bridge, avoiding wet patches on the floors made from rain seeping overhead. People steer around me, whipping out phones to start conversations with black screens. I rotate my ID tag so it faces the front, eyes fixed on an Anglo-woman who takes an umbrella from her husband before he dashes into the men’s bathroom. Her face is a wrinkly sack coated in powder, her platinum bouffant too shiny to be real. She can add to my 65+ quota which is a challenge to meet across all projects.

‘Excuse me,’ I slide up to her just as she pulls out her phone, ‘I’m conducting some research for –.’

‘No, you can’t have my credit card.’ Her nails scratch the screen.

‘It’s research for–.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Alright, thank you for your time.’

She no longer pays attention to me, opening a baby’s photo on Facebook, ‘little wuchi guchi…’ The participant is always right.

‘Have a nice day,’ I nod, a derivative-bow I had learnt from my Cantonese-Vietnamese father. Even though I exhibit Asian mannerisms, I am in no way a proud representative of the Vietnamese-Australian diaspora when working. Quite the opposite. My next participant is a 64-year-old Anglo-Australian man with an Asian woman half his size standing beside him.

‘Do you speak another language other than English at home?’ I read off the Demographics page.

‘Well, my wife Ly here is Vietnamese but I only speak English at home,’ he draws the Asian woman towards him. Her orange-red lipstick and navy eyeliner frown at me. My job is to uphold protocol and obtain customer feedback, not initiate a ruckus about the mail-order bride industry’s colonial foundations. I thank them at the last page and move on. Thankfully, everyone, including other Asians, assumes I’m from mainland China so Ly and I didn’t try to speak Vietnamese to one another like I’d normally try to. I spend the rest of the shift escaping rangers and police officers who threaten to fine me for ‘unauthorised collection of personal information’. My team leader had not prepared a Letter Of Authority because she thought we could conduct surveys in a public area without one.

The market research process itself is ridden with colonial hierarchies. Data collection, cleaning and reporting may sound like a scientific, impersonal and apolitical endeavour. However, higher-ups in companies that seek out market researchers are often upper-class white men, seeking information which will help them manage employees who are more socially and/or economically disadvantaged. These colonial corporate structures place market research fieldworkers in a complex situation of policing their own kind.

During mystery shopping shifts, I evolve from a passive bystander to an active participant in racial and economic discrimination: my task is to rate clients’ employees on presentation and customer service skills. After mystery shopping a middle-aged Vietnamese employee at Bankstown, I tap ‘Fieldwork Office’ on my contacts, ‘hello? Is this Edward Burns? Yes — I’m good thank you. I’m just filling out a mystery shop survey and wanted to run through my responses with you first.’ I stride past tabletops of greasy track marks in Bankstown Centro food court, ‘the customer service staff I assessed at Bankstown was a female who was wearing one non-uniform item, a bright pink bow. Should I mark her down for the bright pink bow?’

‘It’s about customer experience,’ Edward’s low semi-British accent answers me, ‘if you think that the item detracted from her professional image, then you should mark her down. But if you believe it had religious or personal significance, the item would be out of scope.’

‘In my judgement, the bright pink bow was not of religious or personal significance and detracted from her professional image,’ I echoed, tapping the “not very well-presented bubble”, ‘therefore, I will mark her down for the bright pink bow and make a note about it in the open response section.’ I scan the hijabs, prams, and dyed hair passing by, making sure that the employee I had mystery-shopped isn’t in the area. ‘I’m also going to rate the interaction as “poor”.’

‘Because of the bow or other things?’

‘No, no, not just the bow. I’ll read out my note summarising the interaction and explaining why I rated her “poor”, which I’ll attach to the end.’ I tap the additional notes button at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, opening a yellow memo, ‘I approached the staff member on the north side of the shop along the wall where the shoes and socks were kept. Initially, the staff member was speaking loudly with another customer until I stepped within a metre of the staff member. The staff member’s conversation-partner made eye contact with me, farewelled the staff member who then turned his/her attention to me. After I presented my mystery shop scenario ‘Where can I find out about accessible services across stores?’ the staff member snapped –.’

Edward gives a doubtful ‘hmmm’. “Snapped” must come across as “judgemental language”. The Mystery Shopping briefing slides explained the importance of avoiding ‘judgemental language’ because ’employees have lost jobs over unfavourable mystery shopper reviews.’ I correct myself, ‘the staff member said, “what access?! You mean elevator?!” to which I expanded, “yes, like elevator, escalator, lift…” The staff member then responded, “you walk yourself!” with tense forehead muscles and eyebrows pressing on either side of her nose bridge.’

‘Sounds pretty good: no “he” is or “she” is in there. It’s important for the report to be gender neutral… Maybe the stuff about facial muscles is a bit intense though,’ Edward remarks, ‘could you say something like, “frowned” or “annoyed expression”?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ I answer, dumping my hoodie over the tablet as a woman who resembles the employee I assessed walks past. It isn’t her though, just a Vietnamese woman who is also wearing a bright pink bow, ‘but I thought we weren’t allowed to make value judgements: wouldn’t “frown” or “annoyed expression” be inferring a mental state?’

‘True…’ Edward grumbles, ‘ok, how about “seemed to be annoyed” or something. It is a customer impression after all.’

‘Ok.’ “Seemed to be annoyed” sounds redundant to me. The fact that I’m writing the report already shows that it’s my limited first-person perspective.

‘Otherwise, it sounds pretty good. Was there anything you wanted to run by me?’

‘No.’ I state. In reality, a strong Vietnamese accent obscured her English but I marked her answer’s clarity as ‘Clear’. I grew up listening to and copying Vietnamese-accented English so her accent didn’t bother me.

‘Thanks for checking in. Call the office any time you’re unsure of anything.’ The next few times I mystery shopped at Bankstown, Pink Bow woman never appeared.

In Franz Fanon’s concept of the ‘native intellectual’, Fanon indicts people-of-colour who work with colonised powers and characterises them as self-hating facilitators of white supremacy. However, within the morally dubious realm of colonised peoples who chose self-interested assimilation over the socially ordained role of ‘giving voice to’ marginalised communities, there is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind. Ellison’s novel explores a young African-American man’s tensions with his factory-working counterparts and middle-class white society whom he initially gains favour with. In Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind, Beta tricks other prisoners in Nazi concentration camps so he can obtain food and save a silk shirt for himself. Like Ellison’s narrator the Invisible Man, I take on many forms of invisibility, robotically dobbing in clients’ employees while following survey protocols to conceal my own discomfort. On the train to my next locations, my mind swats down quotes like ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’ with equally useless hair-splitting semantics: ‘there’s no such thing as evil’, ‘I’m not good but at least I know it’, ‘change “men” to “human”’. Like Milosz’s Beta, I risk the economic stability of more disadvantaged people for $22-30/hour. Interestingly, both Ellison’s narrator and Beta self-destruct in tragic and violent ways. Perhaps, the pressure of time cuts, increased quota requirements and customers batting away surveys with ‘fuck off’s are karma.

While market research gauges customer experience, I realised early on that some customers are more equal than others. During a cleanliness-checking shift, I finish reporting faeces smeared along the walls of a unisex bathroom in Penrith Westfields when my team leader calls.

‘Hello, Frances speaking?’ The magnetic buttons in my tablet’s case fall out of an open seam, clicking along the tiles.

‘Hey Frances, it’s Kylie Chan,’ I recognise her flawless enunciation and stern tone, ‘I believe you’re scheduled up the North Shore line today?’

‘Not today,’ I prop the tablet open on my knee, ‘I just finished Penrith and am about to head to Mount Druitt, St Marys—.’

‘Leave all those and go to North Sydney first. The North Sydney walkthrough is urgent.’ Kylie states, chatter increasing in the background on her end, ‘The project managers were cranky because the last couple of fieldworkers missed it. It’s a very important task. If you can’t finish the other locations, we can always reassign them.’

‘Are you sure?’ My last walkthroughs at North Sydney only took 10 minutes: each time, the facilities worked perfectly and cleaners scurried in and out every 3 minutes. Reassigning me to North Sydney will prevent me providing much needed reports along the Western Line which are often plagued with litter, graffiti and hazardous substances. However, I don’t object to Kylie’s decision because the North Sydney task will be easy money. I haven’t brushed my teeth yet because my shift started at 5AM. An automatic tap with warm water and paper towels in Greenwood Plaza Shopping Centre sounds appealing. I am the eyes of company panopticons, the cogs of corporate machinery who facilitate white men’s control over other people from racially marginalised groups.

Sometimes, I wish I could forget about the politics. Partway through another mystery shopping shift, I squat on a low step in front of the shutters to Money Lent in Bankstown. The grocery store beside me plays Vietnamese songs with reverb effects so strong that the only words I catch are ‘mãi mong’ (‘always hoping’). Crumbs and carrot strips blow from my mouth as I tear through the end of a bánh mì thịt. I watch the street: Vietnamese women in their late 30s with blue eye shadow and dyed platinum hair; Tempe High School students queuing at Gong Cha. A couple of old men stop in front of the shutters to look at Money Lent’s information about their temporary closure printed on a bright orange sheet. In Artarmon, people give dirty looks to a scraggly girl with a crumbly mouthful and face greasy with sunscreen. Here, elderly Vietnamese people smile at me or no one cares. I belong here—I dust crumbs off my hands. The paper bag turns see-through as I scrape butter off my fingers. My paid break is finished. The next mystery shopping location is Cabramatta. Hopefully, this employee will be better than the Bankstown one. I am paid to give honest reviews, no matter what.