Respondent Anonymity: The starting point in the research process:

Professional market research relies heavily on the principle of respondent anonymity. If people agree to be interviewed and share their opinions, thoughts and ideas they do so with the understanding that this information will not be attributed to them personally, unless they explicitly say and agree otherwise.

Research companies and agents are under the obligation to protect this anonymity so this also means that in reportage of findings and interviews, the respondent cannot be identified from their views and opinions. In summary, insights and findings from market research are ‘generalised’ and ‘anonymised’ when presented back to the commissioning client. This does not preclude using verbatim comments, as long as the verbatim comments are presented in a way that does not help identify them personally or associate them in a way that makes them identifiable.

Why is this important? Respondent anonymity provides reassurance to the respondent. For example, if a customer of, say, a bank or credit card company has strong negative - but legitimate - feedback, they need to feel confident to share and express their opinions without fear that these opinions may prejudice them in any way.

In many cases, audience or customer feedback is not controversial and many respondents are quite happy to share their identities with their feedback. In some cases they WANT to have their views and opinions attributed to themselves.

How Respondent Anonymity is Managed:

- Commissioning clients agree at the outset of any project to respect the anonymity of respondents

- The research company (SR Brand Management) ensures all information that enables personal identification (emails, names, addresses etc.) is protected

- If the sample is being generated and managed by a 3rd party (i.e. a professional sampling company) they will have their own protocols in place in addition to SR Brand Management. In practice

Commissioning Client Anonymity

This is common practice in market research where the commissioning client is testing ideas, concepts, innovations, products or new to market brands. The organisation behind the subject being researched is kept anonymous either entirely or ‘partially’. In the latter case, it is sometimes very revealing to ask respondents who they think is the commissioning brand behind the subject under review. This is entirely at the discretion of the commissioning client and agreed at the briefing stage.

Primary Research Data Security

All primary data from research is captured and stored securely on our AWS secure database. We agree upfront with clients how long we store data and work with them directly on any specific security protocols that may have. We agree a ‘shelf life’ on when the data is to be deleted (or securely transferred). This is done in the context of our policies on respondent anonymity (see above).

The Use of AI Models - Data Security

Incorporation of User/Client Data - as part of the model’s future training dataset.

There is understandably some concern around the usage of AI models in primary and proprietary market research. As public AI models use content they are processing to learn from there is an understandable fear that a commissioning clients’ ideas, concepts and peoples’ responses to them are fed back into the models and into the public domain.

This is NOT the case with the models Soothful employs. We use the API versions of AI models which explicitly do not use client data for training the models. The policies are in the links below:

https://docs.perplexity.ai/discuss/651f007966508200530aa3f4

https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/how-we-use-your-data