What we would learn from this experiment would be invaluable. On the basis of the selections of those first callers, the agency could immediately start to get a sense of what kinds of problems Americans believe they have, not just what they “should” have. The agency could begin to test marketing messages: What motivates people to call? It could start to extrapolate real-world trends: What percentage of people in the target area actually call? The extrapolation would not be perfect, but it would establish a baseline behavior that would be far more accurate than market research.
