BrainJuicer: Thrice upon a time
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Tom Ewing, digital culture officer at BrainJuicer®, discusses the power of a good story in market research.
For as long as I’ve worked in market research, we’ve known the power of a good story. I don’t mean the stories we researchers spin from our data. Some of those, I’m sorry to say, could be beaten in the excitement stakes by See Spot Run. No, I’m talking about the stories we tell ourselves about our industry – on conference stages, across Twitter hashtags, in the pub after work.
These stories are powerful – they shape how we see ourselves and our business, and they help point us in innovative directions. Lots of them are about research participants, and more specifically what on earth is happening to them. Are they changing? Are there less of them? Do we understand them better? In this post I’m going to talk about three of these stories, and how researchers have dealt with the problems they raise.
The first story is a ghost story, of an industry haunted by lost respondents. In this story, research participants are vanishing – becoming harder to recruit, harder to incentivise, harder to work with. The basic compact of research – asking something and getting an answer – isn’t the problem: it’s that the things we ask are too long and tedious, and we ask far too many of them. Researchers have dealt with this technologically – developing cunning router software to industrialise the survey process – and also by embracing engagement, making surveys more attractive or turning them into games.
The second story is a science fiction story. SF is a literature of discovery, and of understanding the unknown. In this case the unknown is the eternal problem of non-response: people who simply don’t ever want to take part in research. And the way we understand it is social media. Social media listening is a kind of “first contact” with an alien race of participants who (we’re told) talk about their lives and brands more freely and authentically than anything a stuffy old survey could capture. This story has been very popular – and no surprise: it holds out the possibility that there are cooler, sexier, realer participants out there, who we can reach as long as we just stop asking questions and listen.
The second story seems to solve some of the problems of the first. Great! But then along comes a third story, and this story is a spy story. Not a Bond spy story, full of guns and sex (this is still research we’re talking about). But a Le Carre spy story, full of paranoia and betrayal: a story where you can’t trust your information, you can’t trust your contacts, and eventually you can’t trust yourself. The engine of this story has been the advances made around behavioural economics, social sciences and psychology, where assumptions research routinely makes about people are thrown into doubt. People are rational? Nope. People make good witnesses of their own lives? Nope. People will give you the same answer before and after lunch? Er…nope.
While the logic of the first story led to improving questions, and the logic of the second story led to abandoning them, in the third story the questions aren’t the problem: the answers are what you need to watch out for. The implications of this are enormous – not just for research, but for marketing in general. One of the main reasons I recently moved to BrainJuicer is that we’re making this third story – of unreliable witnesses and behavioural insights – a frame for our whole research philosophy. But our techniques aren’t the only way forward – high-level analytics, for instance, promises to route around both question and answer.
These three stories seem to pull in very different directions, but really what we’re dealing with here are issues of trust. On the one hand, how much do we trust ourselves to ask the right things? On the other, how much do we trust participants to give us the right answers? Answering these questions will force researchers towards innovative techniques – and new stories, some baffling, some frightening and some hopeful.
Read more from Brainjuicer.
Posted: October 19th, 2011 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Customer Stream | Tags: brainjuicer, market research, Marketing Blog, power of a good story, Tom Ewing | Leave a Comment »
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