Facebook and virtual networks

I used to believe that development of smart and new research methodologies was the way forward for market research. Since then I have worked on number of projects that required real insight into people, their lives and the lives of the things that people buy. The key insights for these projects came from individual people: Greg Rowland provided insights into culture; understanding of the interaction between people and things came from Richard Seymour; great insights came from Daniel Dumoulin, who conducted qualitative research and Matt Hart helped us to transform the observations and insights into ideas for products and communication. Yes, some of these guys have their own agencies but the agency name is a secondary tag; their individual skills are the real added value.

This is the age of endless possibilities for creative individuals in research, marketing, design and increasingly in advertising. Instead of losing their identity inside faceless agency, the individual can use some of the social networking sites, such as Facebook, and create their own global network, their own virtual agency - across regions and across specializations. The network can come together on a basis of common interest – the given project - and the individuals can disperse after the project is finished and form another, different network when needed.

It is easy to apply these rules to consumers and establish a community/network of consumers around common interest using existing sites (Facebook or a blog) as platforms for discussion and co-creation; or one can just look for existing community that consumers have established themselves, and listen. It is about people, not about methodologies.

Comments

[John Kearon]

As an inventor of new tools and techniques this blog challenges me of course.

I've wrestled with this one for most of my entrepreneurial career and my current opinion would be to agree that the individual generally wins. However, we should never forget the power and potential of inventing a new way of looking or doing something - after all such things have enabled progress in science, medicine and even research.

But absolutely agree that the individual wins over cookie cutter factory quant every time :-)

[Jan Šabach]

Hi Jaroslav,
do you see any potential danger in a situation where clients start to think, that they can do their own research this way and skip you as the middle man? In graphic design field this is equal to all those generic design templates (another cookie cutter approach), which give a false impression that anybody can produce a successful design project. I'd suspect that it is similar in research, you need to know what to ask and what the answers mean, but still, clients sometimes want the facts to fit their theory rather than find out the truth. Don't you think that this would probably confirm their suspicion. Wrong question leads to the "correct" answer?

[Jaroslav Cír]

Hi Jan,

I think that it is hard to directly compare design and research. While design is an end in itself, research is a mean to get to the end - first to a new idea and insight and then to new design, product, communication. This type of research - aimed at generation of new ideas - has more to do with general understanding of people and the business than with research methodologies...I think that the middle man whom the clients might skip is the researcher obsessed with methogologies and not the one who helps them to come up with new ideas.

However, most of market research is still done to monitor and evaluate (rather than to illuminate and come up with new ideas). Some of the monitoring is useful, e.g. continous usage panel (which gives you the simple information as to how many people are using your product, how and when) or retail audit (which tells you how many of your stuff and competitive stuff have been sold in which type of store) and it would be wrong not to conduct this type of research or to replace this by such research that is available on Facebook - at least right now.

The type of research that is least useful is the fast moving type that I have talked about on the blog already: ad tests, pack tests etc.; the research that gives the client emotional benefit and seeming reassurance that her product/communication will do well in the market place. Your comment about wrong questions leading to "correct" answers applies mainly here and you are right, this is often happening - the more complex and pseudoscientific measures you introduce to the test the less transparent the results become and one can then choose the "right" set of measures to justify weak product or communication or kill product or communication that would do well in real life. I think that the problem has to do more with the culture in the client's organization and less with research itself. However, I also think that to do less of this type of research would help (it requires somebody on the client side to act on gut feel and informed intuition and be brave enough to make a decision without research) or - when the risk is high - conduct a very simple research, e.g. in case of communication research one might use online panels or communities and rely on open-ended questions, discussion amongst respondents and very few, simple measures.