Market Research

[primeideal]

The other day I purchased baseball tickets online. Then I got a follow-up survey asking me about my experience using mlb.com to order tickets. Okay, pretty standard. Why did I purchase tickets for this series--because my favorite team was visiting. What was the most important factor in picking seats--location, I guess, but they didn't have an answer for "price." What precautions would you want to see in place when ordering food--well, I don't think food service workers should need to wear masks unless they were always wearing them pre-pandemic; most people in our area are vaccinated and I don't want to displace the responsibility of taking health precautions onto the concession stand labor force. Then again, I'm not someone who spends a lot of time ordering beer or hot dogs at the ball park so maybe I'm not the target audience.

And then there was this "check all that apply" question, which was...a lot.

Which of the following do you consider to be benefits of being a baseball fan?

• Improves my mood
• Connects me to my family
• Helps me get through tough times
• Comforts me
• Connects me to the place I currently live
• Connects me to my spouse/partner
• Allows me to pass on important values to my children
• Gives me something to look forward to in my daily life
• Helps me stay in touch with things I like about myself
• Helps me relax
• Allows me to have time for myself
• Allows me to experience a wide range of emotions
• Connects me to my friends
• Connects me to the place I am from
• Makes me feel like I'm part of something bigger than myself
• Reminds me of values I believe are important
• Makes me feel like I'm part of a community
• None of these

A lot of these currently and/or in the past have applied to me! On the one hand, this is surprisingly deep, in a "look, the culture wars are messed up, but here we have hard evidence that institutions like baseball actually are valuable to people in a good way!" way. On the other hand, I feel like MLB's goal is probably on some level to use this for advertising purposes, and I'm both fascinated by this and also fairly skeptical that self-selected survey answerers are going to give them useful data?

There was another survey a while back that was more in the vein of "how do we make baseball hip to the kids, do we speed it up, what do we do??" and there were questions like "okay having given these suggestions, which of these current stars do you recognize? Can you match the pictures to their names?" And I was like "I'm going to be terrible at this, I'm not a visual person and I'm not up with the latest and greatest news..." but I think by identifying the teams from the logos I was able to process of elimination it pretty well.