“Opinions are like assholes – Everybody’s got one” – Harry Callahan
Alright, so it’s a bit of a crass way to start a blog. But the sentiment is true. If there’s one easy way to get people talking, it’s to give your own ‘controversial’ opinion on something. Marketers use this all the time, to get people commenting on posts. We’ve all seen those charts that rank the best chocolate bars, haven’t we?
RIP to your inbox if you post a picture of a round lump of bread with the caption “what do you call this: a bap, a bun, a cob, or a breadcake?”
Incidentally, the correct answer is a bread roll. You know we’re right.
What we mean is that while everyone has their own opinion, ultimately, opinions are worthless without context. The best chocolate bar is subjective. It all depends on who’s being asked about it. Most things are subjective in this way.
Well, perhaps not raw data. That’s the stuff you really can’t argue with (although some people will try, but hey, that’s social media for you). Measurable things like weight, height, the calories in the chocolate bar are all examples of raw data. But the thing is, people don’t get engaged by this stuff, because, on the face of it, it’s quite boring.
For raw data to become useful, you’ll need people to sift through it, and present it in a way that’s clear to understand. So, we decided to do our own experiment to see if we could make something inherently boring and basically useless on its own, into something a bit more fun. We combined raw and subjective data to see if we could draw a conclusion.
Get to the sandwiches, already!
As it’s the right time of year for it, the team decided that Christmas sandwiches were a good product to try. They’re available in loads of shops and supermarkets right now, so we took one from each of the most common shops in our area that were available on the day of the experiment.
Of course, many places do varieties of Christmas sandwich now (pigs in blanket sandwich, brie and cranberry etc.), But they aren’t all available everywhere, so we settled on the classic: Turkey and stuffing. We asked a group of colleagues to rate them hoping to get subjective answers on the taste and presentation/pack design.
But there were also things that weren’t subjective, like calorie content, the price of the sandwich at the point of sale, and whether they had any special filling. These things were beyond our control/judgement, but we asked the colleagues to review them anyway and took an average score from them anyway as our ‘raw’ data.
You might ask: “Why are you doing this?” Well, for fun, mainly. It is Christmas, after all. But this sort of thing is also an example of how we work at iAM when we’re putting together a course. We study the raw data, you know, the stuff that can’t be argued with. But no one wants to take a course just filled with raw data, do they? No, it wouldn’t be engaging. So, we always look at other sources too. Most topics have many subjective articles written about them. So, we’ll read some of those too. Any common themes will be studied further, and we might use them too. Different viewpoints are considered, and we’ll draft scripts according to a mix of it all.
It doesn’t stop there though. All our courses are checked by senior writers in-house, and by our learning design team, who are knowledgeable in lots of subjects, to make sure we’re not putting false information out there. Many courses will be checked by Subject Matter Experts too, and even by learning bodies such as IOSH. But the key is to keep it all relatable, conversational and to treat learners like adults.
But you just want to know who won the sandwich competition, right?
Well, using a mixture of the data supplied plus our opinions*, the best Christmas Sandwich of 2022 is from…
MORRISONS!
Would you have guessed that outcome? We thought it was quite fun anyway. Next time, we might try the chocolate bars.
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*We averaged out our staff scores for Taste and Packaging (both subjective) and allocated points for the raw data - Calorie content (fewer Calories = higher score), Filling (any special filling), and Price (lower price = higher score). We tasted sandwiches from Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury's, M&S, Aldi, Asda, Morrisons, and Lidl, which were the stores with ‘Festive feast’ sandwiches on the date of the experiment. M&S, Waitrose & Lidl came joint second.
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