The paradox of research by Carola Verschoor, MD, BrainJuicer Netherlands

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I have now been in the supplier side of the research industry at BrainJuicer® for a little over four months. I have met wonderful people (colleagues, clients, competitors, respondents, suppliers), attended fabulous industry events (ESOMAR Innovate Conference, Dutch MOA Congress, different universities, etc) and read plenty of research papers and recent findings in psychological, behavioural and neurological science.

As an innovator and marketer, I like to look for paradoxes and areas of tension. They are present in every sector and in every human system with market research being no exception.

I find it surprising then that in the market research industry, our main instrument of work is often called the ‘questionnaire’. Are we as an industry, looking to simply confirm our hypotheses by ticking off questions that only propagate an already established picture? Or are we willing to work ‘obliquely’ to extract answers that illuminate, inspire and give us the full picture?
Recently I finished John Kay’s tremendously great read, ‘Obliquity’. In it, Kay asserts that if your aim in life is to be happy, happiness should be the result of your actions and not the goal of your existence. For the research industry, I would translate Kay’s conclusion by saying if we prioritize the quest for the right answer, we should focus on the tools that will get us there and not concentrating on asking the right question. It is a rather ‘oblique’ way of looking at the process of research but one I sincerely believe is worth pursuing.

Thus the paradox of research is that the answers are always there but poor questions might not lead us to them. How do we get to this elusive goal of objective consumer truth? Figuring out new ways to elicit the right answers, the ones that are not the result of questions but instead answer questions that we never even thought to ask, is where the best research will happen.  Perhaps then new tools, from mass-ethnography to netnography to neuro-scientific approaches, will allow us to do just that—find the answer without the need for any questions to begin with! After all, there are no perfect questions, only perfect answers.

Our goal at BrainJuicer therefore as researchers is to help clients to get to the answers more quickly, more simply and more effectively than traditional quantitative surveys or qualitative probing currently allow. Are we alone in our standpoint against static questionnaires? Maybe, but I certainly hope not. What might just separate this perspective from others in the marketing and research industries is that, while our curiosity for the right answer is imperative, we are willing to experiment with methodologies that might make more traditional researchers gasp. Great research illuminates, inspires and brings us to the answer that will make the difference between more of the same or brilliant marketing that builds value for consumers and for brands, Juice, anyone?

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Posted: January 6th, 2011 | Author: Glen Dower | Filed under: Customer Stream | Tags: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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