Perfect Crowd

From the top of a fridge

Mirand July and her site.

Just brilliant! Simple and very impactful.  Every message coming from a TV and/or flashy Power Point presentation seems like a fake (or even more of a fake) after one has seen a message written on the top of a fridge.   

Via  Design Observer and thanks to Jan Sabach for the tip.

The belly of a fat snake

Fat snake is a term coined by Richard Seymour for traditional market research; research that isolates people and products from the context in which they exist and interact.  Fat snake research pretends to offer a view into real life through the one-way mirror that separates a consumer focus group from the people who are watching it.                                                                                                

"If you want to study a river you don't take out a bucketful of water and stare at it on the shore. A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river, you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow." - Alan Watts The Wisdom of Insecurity (I found the quote on Plannersphere)

When I watch a focus group commissioned to evaluate product concept or communication, when I see the eight tired women tortured by aging psychologist I couldn't feel more like the person sitting on the shore staring into bucketful of water.    

And still the business with evaluative focus groups  is thriving and so is the concept test & simulated market test business. I think that one of the key reasons why the fat snake is getting fatter is the game that some market researcher agencies and market researchers on the client side play with the marketing people.  Typical brand manager stays in his role less than 2 years. This brand manager cannot be evaluated on the real, in-market results of her work during the short time in the job.  She is evaluated on the results of tests that are supposed to predict the future performance of the product mixes she is working on. The research agencies sense their opportunities and they come knocking on the door selling nicely packaged, very sophisticated, evaluative tests. The results of the tests give the brand manager,  her team and her boss sense of certainty. In worst cases, products (especially product concepts) and communication are being optimized to succeed in market research tests rather than the real world.  Most of such products, upon leaving the belly of the fat snake, die in the outside world from an overdose of realness.   

Being able to accept uncertainty is the first step on the way out of the fat snake's belly.  Traditional market research is a product of 19th century, its positivism and objectivism, faith in human progress, certainty of scientific knowledge and control over nature and reality.  Being a child of 19th century, traditional research tries to reduce reality to a set of numbers. The number-set becomes a weapon used by the market researchers and marketeers to fight uncertainty in the middle of the innovation funnel.

The new and fresh research understands that we call reality is a subjective view of the world through given culture and language. The new research embraces subjectivity, uncertainty, emotions and intuition. The new research focuses on the early stages of innovation and communication development. The aim of the new research is to understand the context in which people buy, consume and live. And the ultimate goal of the new research is to translate the contextual understanding  into insights and ideas for great products and communication.

The new research cannot rely on the repetitive tool set of qualitative and quantitative methodologies: the ideas for new opportunities are not locked in the heads of respondents-people, no matter how deep we drill. We, people, are ourselves locked in our particular environment and culture; without knowing that we are trapped.

Ethnography and semiotics are the key tools of the new research, employed to understand the context and decipher the codes by which we lead our lives. 

Internet is at the heart of the new research. On a basic level, Internet is used for cheap and fast data gathering. More importantly, the new research uses Internet as a tool for an open dialog with people and a tool to engage people in the development of new ideas and the innovation process.