�Jennifer Kaplan

surveys arises from a confluence of forces, say scholars: the growing thirst for client feedback to improve products and services; the increasing focus on data; the ease of reaching customers via e-mail and text; and the growing conviction that by rating a product, customers gain a stake in it and become members of that product’s “community.”

“There was a time in marketing where the consumer was on the sidelines,” says Vann Graves, chief executive officer of FL+G, an advertising and marketing company. “Now this idea of participatory marketing helps to engage people. It’s like, ‘I’m affecting the brand by participating.’ ” But the tsunami of surveys is making them far less useful, Graves says. “It works for a lot of service-oriented things,” he says, “but I’m not going to rate my toilet paper online.”

Context is important. Tripadvisor doesn’t face survey fatigue, says Brian Payea, the travel review service’s head of industry relations, because people want others to learn of their travel experiences. “It’s the thing you want to share, whereas the fertilizer I bought and the deck paint I bought that I got requests to review, it’s like, ‘Hmm, not that passionate about it,’ ” he says.

For Michelle Henry, co-founder and president of the Center for Marketing & Opinion Research in Akron, the solution to consumer turnoff is conducting surveys only once or twice a year aimed specifically at improving products. The wrong way is tying surveys to pay or benefits and having the affected employees give them, she says, such as at restaurants whose waiters ask customers to fill out a survey and put in a good word for them.

Reichheld says bloated ratings defeat a survey’s purpose. Coaching responses can drive up scores, but higher scores indicate nothing about whether the customer will return or recommend a product. “The instant we have a technology to minimize surveys,” he says, “I’m the first one on that bandwagon.”

The bottom line Consulting firm Bain says two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies use its consumer survey product—often wrongly.

Edited by James E. Ellis Bloomberg.com Number of Takata air bag inflators expected to be added to a U.S. recall that so far has included 28.8 million air bags. In April regulators said there are 85 million potentially defective, unrecalled Takata inflators on the market.

When Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race on May 3, surrendering the nomination to Donald Trump, he did so from a stage in Indianapolis. Cruz had been in Indiana all week, employing every tactic in the political playbook to try to pull out a win. He crisscrossed the state, blanketed it with ads, and used it as the backdrop for his announcement that Carly Fiorina would be his running mate. In the end, Trump beat him by 16 points and did so by ignoring every rule in that playbook. The presumptive Republican nominee didn’t even bother to fuel up “Trump Force One”—his Boeing 757-200—to join the Hoosiers who had delivered him a landslide. He chose instead to remain in Manhattan and give his victory speech in the lobby of Trump Tower from a lectern that read: “VICTORY IN INDIANA, New York City.”

Trump has gone further than anyone imagined he could by flouting the conventions of national politics. Often this was by choice. As he turns to Hillary Clinton and the $1 billion campaign she’s expected to run against him in the general election, it will also be by necessity. According to multiple people familiar with Trump’s campaign, he has no plan in place to raise a comparable sum—and doesn’t seem particularly inclined to try, anyway. “Do I want to sell a couple of buildings and self-fund?” Trump mused on MSNBC the morning after his Indiana victory. “I don’t know that I want to do that.” Instead, Trump is poised to attempt something radical and never before seen in a general election: a presidential campaign as a one-man show. Says his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski: “This campaign has proven we can achieve things that others can’t.”

The key to Trump’s success so far has been his ability to dominate the news media and shape political coverage without having to rely on paid television ads. “You’re talking about a guy who’s gotten $2 billion in free media,” says Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2012. To Gingrich, Trump represents an

Where Californians will plug in their EVS Election 2016: Milton Glaser and the art of getting out the vote Princeton’s townies have a beef with the school