Breaking out of the Uniformity Bubble
How Qualitative research can foster individuality, creativity
I recently read a blog piece by Wieden and Kennedy’s Head of Planning, Martin Weigel about what he refers to as the “stifling grip of pre-packaged thinking”.
It’s a wide-ranging piece, and I found myself speed-reading - but essentially it suggests that algorithms are increasingly taking over in content creation, are always looking to replicate what is popular-cum-succesful, and the result is a wave of uniformity. Originality falls by the wayside.
That’s my paraphrase - if you have a good 15 mins you can check out the whole piece here: Fighting the Astro-Turfing of Culture....
Assuming my synopsis is reasonably accurate, planners and creatives have a tough time of it - encouraged to be essentially creatively conformist, avoiding subtleties, play or wordplay for example. Why not simply employ some form of AI to “learn the rules” and churn out content quickly, endlessly to populate somebody’s time-line or feed. Success - but on a road to nowhere.
This reductivist dystopia is the opposite of what I think Weigel is hoping for - communication that sparks the imagination, touches on things that are subtle, or even left unsaid.
Which lead me to think: can market research help?
Re-Think the Role of Research
No, that’s not a question to provoke a LOL response - qualitative research for starters with the correct remit in the hands of people who know what they’re doing can be powerfully provocative in uncovering “stuff”. Small data can be powerful.
It’s something that maybe is becoming forgotten in the age of analytics - the contemporary qualitative toolkit.
A few examples:
Storytelling: inviting people to bring along something they own that means something to them to your first interaction - and then to talk about that. Doesn’t take long, and can be extremely revealing.
Deprivation excerises: asking people to spend time without something, their breakfast routine of choice for example, document what they think, do, feel, say. And then chat through the outputs, maybe there are a few very concrete pointers, emotional reactions that can spark a communication brief. Even contradictions ;)
Or shaping co-creation workshops with pre-selected groups of people with differing views or backgrounds, who are then invited to interact on a particular topic - using role-playing, for example, even dressing up.
There’s lots more. Projective techniques. Ethnographies - or something resembling them. Qual research really is a whole lot more than groups and in-depth interviews. I’m sure all the good folk in qualitatative research will be able to add to this list - in the Anglo-sphere, the AQR and QRCA are great pools of qualitative talent.
Weigel’s doesn’t mention qual, or any of the above, which is sort of puzzling for a very senior planner. He actually pushes back against the codification of “insight generation”, reduced to a process and likely formulaic outcomes. Fair enough maybe.
But he does flag up the need for “genuine empathy” - again, one of the primary tasks of qualitative research.
Qualitative Research - More than Groups and IDIs
So maybe qual research needs to flag up the range of its options more visibly, so that more people like Mr. Weigel are aware of them. Sounds like there is potentially a good fit.
Yes, there are definitely challenges, pressures on qualitative research to deliver depth of understanding, surface nuances - speed of turnaround for one, increasingly larger data sets another.
But these are things that qualitative researchers can overcome - with the right client relationships, with the right comms agency relationships. Good qual research really can spark the imagination, capturing the reactions of outliers, innovators, game-changers for example - by listening carefully, sifting and surfacing, interpreting the complex realities of what human existence is all about.
Mr. Weigel begins his piece with a quotation from French symbolist poet Paul Éluard. I’ll finish mine with one from 16th century French essayist and philosphier Michel de Montaigne (Livre III, “Du Repentir”) which summarises the wonderful challenge facing the contemporary qualitative researcher: human complexity
“Je ne puis asseurer mon object. Il va trouble et chancelant, d’une yvresse naturelle. Je le prens en ce point, comme il est, en l’instant que je m’amuse à luy. Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage : non un passage d’aage en autre, ou, comme dict le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour en jour, de minute en minute. Il faut accommoder mon histoire à l’heure.”
Deepl or ChatGPT might help with the translation - or more on M. de Montaigne. But there’s nothing like the original ;)
Curious, as ever, as to others’ views.
(Image: Photo by Katie Montgomery on Unsplash)