Creativity and the problem with research

Research has always had a difficult relationship with creativity. On one hand, focus groups are constantly accused of crushing ideas, and research is presented as a barrier to good creative thinking. On the other, it’s clear that understanding our consumers’ lives and the cultural context in which they live is an important source of creative inspiration.

As an industry we find this hard because we use a big fat word – research – to describe interactions with consumers. The word research implies that all consumer interactions are fundamentally similar, and this hides important philosophical divisions within the industry. For me the two sides of the argument are well represented by Karl Popper and John Hegarty.

In Hegarty’s excellent ‘Hegarty on Advertising’ the great creative director tells us:

?“I define creativity as an expression of self. You cannot create great work unless a little bit of you goes into it, be it your heart, your soul or your beliefs. Whatever you create – it could be painting, writing, designing or even advertising – the work that results is an expression of you”

So the creatives within an FMCG business and their agency network are looking for new insights about consumer behaviour that they can respond to creatively. Having found inspiration, it’s really important that they have the confidence to take a punt on what the solution will look like, be that a communications idea, a design solution, or an interesting flavour profile. For this group to succeed, they need both inspiration, and to be confident in the potential of their ideas. So to succeed in this sort of research we need to find new ways to elicit interesting responses, and make space for consumers to surprise us with the details of their lives, so that we can respond instinctively.

Conversely, anyone who has done a degree with a statistics module will have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Karl Popper. Popper says things like:

“It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory—if we look for confirmations… ?A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific …Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.”

Popper’s big contribution to the philosophy of science was that you have to have a null hypothesis. It’s possible that putting a gorilla in a Cadburys advert will drive sales, but we won’t believe that until we've demonstrated that the absence of the gorilla is less effective than the presence of the gorilla, and we do that with a link test.

The result of this is that if you’re a scientifically oriented researcher, you’re in a constant state of self-denial, refusing to believe your own instincts unless you’ve demonstrated their rightness in an appropriately designed experiment. This group will tend to put a lot of focus on details of recruitment specification and may well create long, specific discussion guides for qualitative research, to ensure the right test has been created. It's a different mindset from the self confidence required to be creative.

The rift between these two groups plays out in predictably unhelpful ways. The advertising agency arrive at focus groups excited by their new idea and keen to hear how to build it. If you’ve hired the wrong sort of research agency for the project, they arrive looking to disprove existing hypotheses, in order to give their clients a scientific recommendation. As a result the ideas get crushed and you get the stereotypical dissatisfaction, criticism of focus groups, and unhappiness all round.

So what’s the answer? Fundamentally, both of these philosophies are useful in the functioning of a modern insight team.

-???????In some circumstances we need research to elicit new ways to think about consumers, explore their place in culture, and build creative ideas constructively. This is what we do at Huxly, and we apply it to brands, design, communications, and the sensory experience of food and drink products. We’re using a creative, exploratory mindset to build new possibilities.

-???????In other circumstances we need the cold, hard measures of evaluative research. Traditional research approaches – both qualitative and quantitative – have an important role here, in demonstrating that the commercial strategies we’ve built are likely to make money for our clients.

If I could change one thing about the way research projects are briefed it would be to be clearer about the difference between research designed to elicit and inspire, and research designed to test and evaluate. For an insight team to work effectively it needs to be able to switch gears from inspiration to evaluation smoothly, applying different approaches at appropriate moments. If we can be clearer on the differences between the two we’ll get better results, and a clearer understanding of how research delivers insight and creates profitable growth.

If you want to find out more about designing research for creative outcomes, drop me a note!