There’s an additional aspect to this - actually surveying well is incredibly difficult, from making sure you’re not using leading questions, to balancing for bias, to a myriad of other factors. And then you have the interpretation of the results, which can be highly steered by those with agendas, and then how the hell you actually action anything based on those results too.
There’s a great deal of the underlying arguments of this scenario at play:
Yes, C started out (after uni) working for a market research company. They were good at it, where ‘good’ was defined as providing clients with convincing explanations of why their TV (usually) ad campaign was or wasn’t working. In the end there was an objective metric - sales volume - which tended to focus everyone’s minds.