How Far Can We Rely on ‘Instant Survey’ Results of ‘Survey Startup’ Companies?

Survey Startup companies are sprouting like mushrooms across geographies. They claim that they have huge millions of ready-to-answer people to whom these companies in turn give cash-to-talktime kind of benefits. These companies open their shop with a few bunch of techie employees, put up a website, explain what they do in their site, tell upfront their charges for each survey question, and finally start delivering results in the form of reports and dashboard analysis.

For example, if a FMCG company has come up with a new chocolate concept idea and wants to know how people respond to that idea, then they can go to these survey startups, pay money, and conduct a survey. Almost, within an hour, the survey startup provides company's survey results mostly under the following categories: Like, Dislike, Respondents demographic AGE, and which Device they used to respond to company's survey. That's all! Now, it is the turn of the company to believe whether the survey results are OK or not. At no point, the survey startup reveals the identity of its respondents to anyone. They always maintain that as their own sweet little secret.

In this scenario, how far one can rely on these survey results. Extending the above example little further, for example, how the FMCG company knows whether the respondents are chocolate eaters are not? Because, whether a type of chocolate is good or bad for them, whether they like a particular taste or not, etc. details can be told only be real-time chocolate aficionados. Indirectly, what this blog is trying to say is that the respondents have to be driven by that chocolate eating passion but not by some other offer like talktime/cash/etc.

But in survey startup case, it is a very much clear that the respondents are not chocolate lovers. They are responding to the company's survey just for the sake of getting free talktime or some other offer. In this scenario, how can the FMCG company can rely on startup company's survey results. For that matter, no company worth its revenue generating channel can rely on this kind of startup company survey to test the feasibility of their innovative ideas until they found a transparent mechanism to address all the loopholes of these 'instant surveys'.

What do you say?