Research is Seeing What Everybody Else Has Seen and Thinking What Nobody Else Has Thought. - Albert Szent-Gy?rgyi

Research is formalized curiosity. Yet everyone is curious about how to do it and use it. Like a lamppost, you can use it for illumination or to lean against like a drunk.

Focus Groups: If You Wanted to Learn about Lions, Would You Go to the Serengeti or the Zoo?

Ask a focus group if anyone in it has been in one before and you’ll likely have multiple hands go up. These days, it seems that everyone has been in one or is at least familiar with the concept. Participants are no longer blank slates offering raw reactions to consider. Instead, they’ve been transformed into regular marketing gurus wearing their overthink caps. Unfortunately, too many clients let them live out their fantasies, making major decisions based on the opinions of a handful of amateurs caged in a sterile research room. It’s as artificial as a zoo. Have you considered going out into people’s natural settings in the real world to see how they actually live and feel?

Don’t Rely on “Mesearch”

?Rule #1 of Marketing: Know your customer

Rule #2 of Marketing: You are not your customer

?No matter how empathetic you may be don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can read the mind of those you’re trying to reach. Do the research. Trust the research, not your gut. And for Heaven’s sake, don’t rely on kitchen table research from your spouse, your child, your dog… whomever and whatever. It always help to gather thoughts and opinions from all around, butnever use yourself as a focus group.

The Trouble with Market Research is That People Don’t Think What They Feel, They Don’t Say What They Think and They Don’t Do What They Say. -David Ogilvy, the Champion of Champions of Research

Directly asking consumers what they want is inherently flawed. People don’t really know what they would do at the moment of purchase or why they do it. And, thanks largely to the behavioral economics work of Daniel Kahneman, we know that our decision-making in general is far less rational than we like to think.

As Kahneman said, “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it but they’d prefer not to.”Instead, how people think is guided mostly by a System 1 mode of thought: fast, instinctive, and emotional. The System 2 mode of thought that is slower, deliberative, and logical is usually playing catch-up — often rationalizing decisions we’ve already made by gut feel.

Bottomline: Watch what they do more than listening to what they say. Because the most reliable market research is often what you find out in-market.

Be Hypothesis-Driven / Have a Point of View- Marc Landsberg, Social Deviant (Chicago)

We avoid boiling the ocean to reduce both time and cost. As soon as we get a brief / challenge from a client, we take a beat, examine the landscape, and discuss our initial hypotheses. As Malcolm Gladwell said in his amazing book?Blink, our immediate instincts are informed by all of our prior experiences. As seasoned brand marketers, we love to grok it around a bit, develop hypotheses, and THEN test them to accept/reject the hypotheses.

Make Creative for Consumers Not Researchers

Advertising and other creative fields are a right brain craft, not a left-brained profession. It shouldn’t be spelling out how people should think and react. Over-relying on the assumptions of those who mine data and other left-brained efforts can be counterproductive. It frames things only in rational terms. It nips creativity in the bud. Without balancing both sides of the brain, your efforts will lack the texture and depth, serendipity and spontaneity that will capture the hearts of the people.

Great Work is Bought by Powerful People, Not the Weak.? – John Hegarty, Advertising Legend

No matter how much data and research you’ve done, sooner or later you’re going to have to make a call that requires a leap of faith. Some intuition. Guts. After all, if all the data and research available to us today hasn’t resulted in an overflowing abundance of great work. Instead, over-relying on data has led to weak decisions manufacturing even weaker work.

Hegarty also reminds us, "Data is only as good as the people who designed the data systems. Market research is not the highest rung of the professional ladder. Most people who do quant in market research don’t know what a Fields medal is. For those wondering that’s the equivalent of the Nobel prize in math." That's not to disparage marketing researchers, but to remind you that they are not flawless.

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