Numbers game

In The Australian today, Michael Bodey looks at the reasons the Vega radio stations in Sydney and Melbourne failed. He points, quite rightly, to a failure in the market research, with potential audience members misleading the researchers about what they actually wanted to hear. Of course, radio isn't the only medium that relies heavily on research. Many of the changes in newspapers over the past decade have been driven by surveys and focus groups. And, while it's undeniable that newspapers worldwide are losing readers, the papers that have had the biggest drops in circulation include those that have had dramatic makeovers driven by this research. Television, of course, is in a different situation. Since they advent of people-meters, programmers have an instant, accurate snapshot of what people actually are watching (and what they are not watching) - assuming the researchers have their demographic sample sorted out properly, that is.
Update: A Twitterer suggests that maybe it wasn't the research to blame, but the flawed implementation of the research.