How do you find MegaBank Inc’s new logo?

What do your tastebuds associate with Chateau Migraine’s red wine?

Which arguments of Sensible Party have convinced you to vote for them?

The survey industry asks thousands of such questions every year, achieving a turnover of over $10B in the US alone. According to MRS, the market research industry spends an impressive $61 annually on every UK citizen.

Answers to the questions above might then look something like this:

The design is nice, but I liked the colors of the old one better.

It reminds me of Spanish dancers, Flaminco (sic.)

They are the ones addressing the issue of unevenly cut lawns besides highways.

As in most cases a quantitive analysis of these responses is desired, the usual practice is to map answers to a fixed set of 10–40 codes.

Quantifying open questions (coding): Map responses to codes.

This process of coding is often very labour intensive, slow and error-prone. Most companies we have talked to, do this literally using Excel and (!) paper. Imagine you have a medium sized survey with three open-ended questions and 1000 respondents each. It will probably take you dozens of hours to code these or (if you do it externally) cost you hundreds of dollars.