Marketing Test #2

As I may have mentioned before, the marketing tests are 50 multiple choice questions based primarily on questions from a test bank maintained by the publisher of our textbook (supposedly 80% from this test bank and 20% written by the professor). The professor must select questions at random (and without stratifying the sample pull) because we seem to get a very strange and to my eye, non-representative-of-the-key-concepts selection of questions on the test. For instance, one question asked about a particular finding of market research done by Mattel, but the vast majority of the central concepts of market research were not touched on at all.

When I got home from taking my exam, I flipped through the chapters of the book to identify which problems I missed. There were 8 problems that I had struggled with a bit and was able to determine that I missed half of them - I had actually barely gotten one of them right but had applied multiple choice test-taking heuristics and managed to figure it out. But I also found that I had missed one question that seemed obviously correct to me at the time. So my test score prediction was 90%.

Robert was quite surprised that I could remember what the test questions were, and though I could not sit down and totally recreate the test from memory, I did remember many of the questions outright and could basically recognize relevant terms or statements from the book and then remember the question about them.

Two of my misses were totally fair - the questions that were asked about two stages of the product lifecycle wanted answers that did not match up with what I thought were the important aspects of those stages, but I should have been able to answer them and truly just did not know/remember. Another one was somewhat annoying simply because I misread the question as equating size to sales volume rather than size to number of firms in the market and thus answered the wrong question (and knew the right answer to the actual question).

The question that I confidently answered incorrectly chaps me because I suffered from both too much actual knowledge about the example being used (segmentation strategy for REI) and the book stupidly equating psychographic segmentation with the Claritas system of customer profiling based on Census block-level data. Since I know deeply that the probabilistic "lifestyle" segmentation programs like Claritas and Tapestry are not good at predicting participation in outdoor recreation, due to having used both programs to attempt that very thing, I did not pick "psychographic" segmentation as my answer, and instead chose "behavior" (which I interpreted to encompass things like participation in activities). But in one small chart in the book, "behavior" is equated to the purchase situation, not behavior of the consumer in general. Damn.

But the thing that made me full of righteous anger was a question that, when I encountered it on the exam, totally confused me. The question states: "Classification by degree of _________ divides products into the categories of nondurable good, durable good, and service." The obvious answer should be "usability over time" or (Robert's suggestion for a one word answer) "permanence." Durable goods, like a car, are used over a long period of time. Nondurable goods, like food, are used up quickly. Services must be consumed at the time they are produced (you cannot save them up). But the answer choices were:
A. I don't remember but something obviously stupid
B. Tangibility
C. Liquidity
D. Porosity (I am not making this up)
E. Price

I immediately gravitated toward tangibility because goods are discernable to the touch but services are not. But then I thought, This is not true; tangibility can distinguish goods from services but not durable goods from nondurable goods. A Big Mac is as tangible as a washing machine. (Arguably sex with a prostitute is also tangible in a sense, but I am willing to let this argument go.) I even wrote down on the test itself “Tangibility does not separate durable from nondurable goods.”

Then I thought, well given that tangibility is obviously incorrect, liquidity is the only option that I can make any kind of case for, since I can order the three types of products by typical capacity convert them into cash, and maybe the professor is meaning liquidity to have a time element to it. But when I looked through the book, I found that the test question was in the textbook verbatim; it was not some poorly worded question my own professor made up but is the official textbook line. And this filled me with that feeling (that I am sure you will recognize as a particularly Sally feeling) of “How can they say that when it isn’t true! They must know that it isn’t true!” that I am sometimes overwhelmed with and that motivates me to want to eviscerate the originators and disseminators of such blatant falsehood. Something about this kind of proclamation of manifestly incorrect information by people who are speaking from a position of authority and expertise so that they will be believed by naïve others seems to make me react as though my fundamental values have been violated, which I guess is actually the case.

I did appreciate Robert's observation that I tend to struggle with introductory classes because I have difficulty understanding concepts at a sufficiently superficial level.

This evening I checked the class website and our grades have been posted. I got a 90 as anticipated, barely eking out the A. I am glad to get the A on its own merits but also specifically because it relieves me somewhat of this desire to barge into the professor’s office and challenge him, perhaps not to an actual duel to the death, but to find any extant accepted definition of tangibility that can separate durable from nondurable goods that does not smuggle in a temporal element that is not inherent to the word itself. This would be extremely counterproductive.