Global survey - initial results

Roughly two months have passed since we initiated a global consumer survey with the purpose of shedding some additional light on the lack of effectiveness of the product manuals.

To set the right context for our survey and thereby to ensure that our methodology and our empirical data is useful, we spent some time defining what a product manual is.

Definition

Early this year we wrote that the product manual has many names, however, we needed to define it.

A product manual is a physical or digital document (made available by URL) that the consumer is provided during the unboxing of the purchased product. The product manual can consist of 1 or many pages, contain localised content, imagery or graphical material, warranty information and product registration guidelines.

Methodology

We decided to use online survey tools to build our 21 questions questionnaire. The subjects were divided into 6 sections, starting with the easy questions and slowly asking more in-depth questions. All respondents remained anonymous and were able to answer the questionnaire once. Finally, the respondents were selected randomly, and we decided to run the survey over a period of nearly two months across all continents primarily focusing on English speaking entities.

Empirical base (n=1251)

We managed to receive 1251 fully answered surveys. As evident in chart 1. below, 57% of the respondents were male while the rest, 43% were female.

Moreover, as shown in chart 2, 59% of respondents are in the age group 18-24 which made up the biggest respondent age group. At second place with 30%, we have age group 25-34, and the third largest age group was 35-44 with 8%.

Also, the survey data shows that the respondents come from a variety of continents. As evident to chart 3 the majority of the respondents are from located in Asia, Africa and Europe. Collectively more than 80% come from these three continents.

Finally, we are super excited to dig deeper into the survey results. The initial analysis shows that our assumptions and early finding are in some cases fully and partially confirmed. At some point during March 2018, we will release the initial review.