Call For Opinions
When Alison Macleod of The Human Element blog posted her plea for market researchers to be more opinionated, I took it as something of a challenge. So here, quite unsupported by anything other than grumpiness and prejudice, are some of my research- (and social media) related opinions.
1. “Insights” aren’t zen koans. If you can express something that briefly, it’s probably banal.
2. Between “data” and “recommendation” comes a little thing called “argument” which we neglect rather too readily.
3. Making two different pieces of information talk to one another is the most important skill a researcher (or almost anyone) can have.
4. We may not be as good as we ought to be at interpreting information, but by god we’re better at it than 90% of the people who end up blogging that information, so we have to get the message right from the start.
5. We are really bad at making celebrities out of our great practitioners: where’s the research Rory Sutherland? Why isn’t she or he at TED?
6. An online community is a factory for unintended consequences, and most of the people using them don’t understand how they work, let alone how to analyse them well. (I am not saying I understand how they work either.)
7. I know some very bright people who do semiotic work but on stage or in case study format it almost always ends up looking like a qual black box, one set up to produce undergraduate cultural studies essays.
8. I am always scrupulously polite about neuromarketing but if you were to WIRE UP MY BRAIN at a convention you’d be able to tell my true feelings. Or I might just be thinking of how nasty the canapes were.
9. The engine powering social media isn’t “influence”, it’s favouritism. Most talk of ‘trust’ is a way of justifying cronyism. This is not always bad, still less is it avoidable, but it’s not a brave new social arrangement either.
10. Hypocritical this in the light of much of the above, but the very worst thing about market research is its unending tendency to flagellate itself and envy people who are a great deal less informed than it is.
I’m not saying these are controversial, or consistent, and certainly I bet they’re not all correct, but there you are. Opine away on your own blogs!
