This past March, I had the privilege of traveling to London to attend Market Research Society’s Annual Conference. I spent the whole week in London attending the conference and taking meetings. And while I very much enjoyed the conference and meeting new and old friends, the things that stuck with me are two encounters I had with, well, art. Let me explain.

I arrived on the Sunday before the conference and decided to do some sightseeing. As I wandered through the various exhibits in the Tate Modern, I realized that the art that really resonated with me were the pieces distilled a moment of meaning, mood, or observation down to a single expression. It didn’t matter if the media were oil paint, mechanical pencil, two-dimensional or three. Somehow great visual art has a way of visually expressing something about the human condition that is difficult to express in words. And, true to my research geek self, I started to think about this in the context of our mission in research. Isn’t our ultimate goal to reveal and communicate customer understanding to our clients? Standing in the midst of some of the world’s great art, I wondered. How could market research tap in to the power of art to communicate what we learn about consumers to our clients?

Fast-forward two days. After the first of what would prove to be two great days at the MRS conference, the MRS is hosting an evening after event in a bar, but there’s another intriguing event happening at the same time. A group called the Research Liberation Front (RLF) put on a parallel event called “Raiders of the Lost Art” around the corner from the MRS event. It promised to be an art gallery "providing a showcase for all the creativity and treasure that the world of research has produced… We’re talking work lovingly prepared by participants; collages, videos, mood boards, diaries etc., something put together by an agency, be it a hero chart, a slide from a presentation etc., or something produced by a client! Ultimately, we are looking for anything, nothing is too small, too big or too weird – we are raiding the industry for lost treasure as the RLF asks, is this ART?"

Given my trip to the Tate Modern, how could I not attend this event!? So I went and enjoyed it immensely. As promised the RLF, led by merry research provocateur, John Griffiths, had in fact created a miniature gallery filled with everything from mood boards to riffs on Monopoly to videos. You can see a video of the event here.

You may notice that one thing that was very conspicuously missing: PowerPoint.

The more I think about my two encounters with art in London, the more I am convinced that market research needs more art. We spend so much time collecting and creating our insights and understanding, yet all that work can go for naught if it isn’t presented in a way that, like great art, distills and elegantly communicates its meaning. It is a big challenge in a Powerpoint world, but one well worth taking up!

A eulogy activity can be a powerful way to get at the heart of a consumer’s affinity to a product. In a eulogy activity, participants are asked to write about what the loss of a product would mean to them and how they might replace it. You can even opt to include a video segment. This can yield some very powerful results.

Here’s an example where participants were asked to eulogize a kitchen appliance: Imagine that as of tomorrow, your food processor no longer existed. Pretend that all food processors have vanished and that you’ll never see or use one again. No more slicing, grinding, or shredding. Please think about and respond to the following questions.

1. Write a brief eulogy for the food processor. Reflect on its life and accomplishments, and how it will be remembered. What might you say at its funeral?
2. Once you've written your eulogy, please make a short video of yourself delivering the eulogy and upload it here.
3. Who will miss the food processor the most? Who will miss it the least?
4. What or who might take its place now? And what is the one thing you can tell us about food processors that others might be surprised to hear
5. Lastly, what do you think caused the food processor’s demise?

This activity comes to us courtesy of Jon McNeill of Hall & Partners. If you have an activity you would like to submit for an upcoming Revelation newsletter, please email us at info@revelationglobal.com.

Kicking off a project with a "Getting To Know You" activity is the most effective way to get a project off to a great start.

"Getting to Know You" activities serve several different purposes in a project. First, they enable you to learn a little more about each participant – home, family, hobbies and interests – in an easy warm up activity. This first activity is the participant’s first interaction in the project and provides a 'low risk' assignment that enables the researcher and technical support team to help participants address any technical issues. Second, showing a video or photo of the research team is beneficial and can really set a great atmosphere by showing there’s a real person on the other end of the line. And lastly, the researcher can use this first activity as a low effort 'first touch' with participants. Researchers don’t need to spend much time analyzing any data from the activity and can quickly acknowledge that they’ve read the participant’s answers and welcome them to the project.

In this activity participants are asked to answer a few open-ended questions and post photos. These photos could be of their family, home, friends–basically, photos of people, places and things that are important to them. I would encourage you to share a bit about yourself here – either a photo or introductory video. Here's an example "Getting To Know You" exercise taken from a past Revelation project. We introduced the activity this way:

I'd like to start off by learning a little about you. What do you do during the day? What are your hobbies? And what does a typical weekend look like for you?

Tell me about the other people and pets who live with you.

I'd like to get to know your environment a little better as well. Please upload photos of you and your home and any photos of family members, friends and pets you think would help me get to know you better. Anything else you'd like to add that would help me get to know you better?

Personal motto, favorite coffee drink...anything that you'd like to add? Thanks!

Over the past month, I have had the pleasure of attending three (and presenting at two) research conferences, the MRS Online Conference in London on September 30^th, the QRCA Annual Conference the first week of October in Palm Springs, and the ESOMAR Online Conference.  During and in between those conferences, I have also had numerous conversations with researchers. Rather than attempt to wrap up the specifics of each conference, I thought I'd wait, process a bit and see if I could find themes that cut across all of these conferences and reflect on the current MR zeitgeist.

I think the overwhelming sense from both the presentations and, perhaps more importantly, the many individual side conversation with researchers of all stripes,  is that the industry is changing, perhaps fundamentally.  The economic crisis has forced the industry to slow down and take stock, and in doing is forcing MR to confront issues that have been brewing for a number of years now - commoditization of access to people, sample quality and validity, engagement practices and more.

Yet, while there is general agreement that things are changing, the scope, pace and ultimate end game is the subject of much discussion, gnashing of teeth and conjecture.

In my Pecha Kucha presentation at the ESOMAR Online Conference, I used the picture above to bring to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant to explain why it is so hard to pinpoint one definition of Web 2.0.  If you recall that story, each man touches a different part of the animal, which gets described alternately as a fan, a snake, a rope, a tree, or a wall.  I think this is also an appropriate analogy for where we are in understanding where MR goes next.  It feels to me like we are all touching different parts of the elephant and shouting: It's online communities! No, it's mining social media! No it's sample quality! No, it's flash surveys!  No, it's 'listening'!

But in my opinion, no one has described the whole elephant.  I don't think anyone has stepped back far enough to see it wholly yet. But we know something big is in the room.

I confess I don't know what the MR elephant looks like, but here are some thoughts:

1. Start with Mission not Methods — First, we have to start from the MR mission, which as simply as I can express it is "to understand people to answer business questions."  The recent history of MR online is a narrative of a method oriented technology adoption.  We've taken offline methods - surveys and focus groups - and simply used technology to replicate them in the new medium.  It's time to step back, look at the mission and ask ourselves, "Given that technology has now given us access to people at the moment of purchase, consumption, use, decision, etc., how can use our new tools to best serve the mission?"
2. Data is Everywhere - We Must Master It — The servers of the world are bulging with data. Club card purchase records. Millions of tweets and blog posts.  Data marts and data warehouses on business intelligence systems. Primary research that we gather ourselves, both qual and quant. Government reporting data. Focus group video. Mobile phone logs.  Video diaries. All that data contains pieces to the puzzle.  If market research is truly about the mission, we must learn how to triangulate data from any relevant source and make sense of it. We must be equally adept with Business Objects, SPSS and qualitative analysis, text and media analysis tools, trend mapping, and other skills that that help us piece together and present customer narratives in a compelling fashion.
3. We are studying PEOPLE — Call them what you will, respondents, participants, co-creators - at the end of the day we are in the business of understanding people - from ground truth to 30k feet trends.  We have greater access to engage people in conversation than at any time in history. This is a good thing.  Let's converse.  Let's also share what we learn with them - they are interested to know about themselves and will give us even more for the bargain.
4. The Fundamental Business Questions Do Not Change — As the recent crisis has illustrated all to dramatically, the fundamentals of business do not change (as much as each generation deludes itself). Companies do not hire researchers to do surveys, focus groups, ethnographies, online communities or any other specific method. They hire us to provide answers to the fundamental business questions. These questions - developing core customer understanding, discovering opportunity,  evaluating ideas, and measuring results - are as timeless as business itself.  No matter what the elephant turns out to look like, it must be about serving these questions.

The good news in all of this is that we are researchers. We should be well equipped to figure the elephant out.  And I think we are in the midst of this process. To be sure, there is a lot of meta-research going on - research on MR. ARF and others have been focusing on sample quality. At the ESOMAR Online Conference last week, Ray Poynter presented some excellent and surprising research on what study participants find most engaging. 

One of the things about tough economic times is that they force people to re-think things that were previously taken for granted as true.  Even though it can be a painful process, I think MR will look back on this time as what we needed to acknowledge and reveal the elephant in the room.

As this picture and caption makes abundantly clear, online  is a wonderful medium for rich self reporting using photos and video.  While video is considered to be the ultimate in capturing participant experiences, photos can be equally strong in the right context and much more efficient.  So which to use when? Let's compare shall we?

Video is great in that it's the richest medium and can really bring people to life. However, video is expensive in terms of time and effort by participants, can be awkward for some participants, and requires more analysis and editing time on the back end, not to mention bandwidth and storage. 

Photos are very efficient, can help folks capture more immediate moments (like the doughnut moment above),  and they don't have nearly the back end analysis and presentation overhead that video does. Photos are also excellent for projective and metaphor exercises. People also tend to be much better photographers than videographers on the whole, and have a better shot of taking good quality pictures than good quality video.

Which you use when is a factor of goals for the activity, study and the type participans you are working with. Photos tend to be better for capturing very quick moments like the donut moment above. So moment to moment diaries around usage and consumption are a good match for photos. Video is great for environments and processes - "here's what I do, and where I do it."  While cameras are getting easier and easier to use in terms of taking video, participants still have to post the video, which can be a time consuming process, so if you have a lot of activities planned, picking your spots for video makes sense. Also, keeping in mind the technical sophistication of participants is always  key in making sure activities match the abilities and availability of your participants.

In the end, it's not an either or decision. Video and photos can be used in concert together within a study to leverage the best of each in bringing your participants to life.

Online ethnography is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. As someone who has been exploring and wrestling this issue  in terms of methodology, terminology and practice since late 2003, it is interesting to see researchers attempting to try replicate ethnogrpahy online.

However,  to me, it has become less about doing ethnography via online or remote and more about understanding online as a medium and how it is best suited to serve the researcher's mission. To my way of thinking, the researcher's mission is to understand human experiences and behaviors in the context of a particular question or set of business questions.

Ethnography is one methodology to this end, but it is not the end itself. My take on the question of virtual or remote ethnography has evolved from "how can we use the online medium to do ethnography" to "how can we use the online medium to best serve the mission of qualitative research."  Given that ethnography requires direct observation, it tends to require a live presence, and the efforts to date that I have personally seen to try to use the online medium as a purely observational platform have felt clumsy and unsatisfying. (I haven't seen them all, of course). 

My experience is that while online or remote is not a really good observational medium, it's a tremendous medium for participant self reporting and engagement (see Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc).  While the online medium is weak as a platform observation, it excels at a number of things that in-person struggles with due to the limitations of resources of time and money - and intrusiveness to participants. The confluence of broad band connectivity, social software, rich media  and wireless devices has given us  access to human experiences on a scale and with a reach that is simply mind boggling.  Online is really strong at  sustaining interaction, seeing longitudinal behaviors, and therefore capturing experiences as close as possible to the time that they happen.  And in reality, the things we are most interested in learning about our customers happen when we are not there - during the course of everyday life.

In a sense the Internet, as it does with so many things, has democratized research a bit. In an online study, the people we research are both our subjects and our research assistants who we work with to co-create understanding.  It is this reason that activities that come out of the coaching and psychology world - that put people in position to understand themselves better - are so effective in this medium.

This is what continues to excite me and the rest of the team at Revelation. Every day is day where we are breaking new ground and better understanding  the online medium - its strengths and conventions and how they can best be applied to serve the mission of qualitative market research.

Research activities in Revelation don't have to be elaborate to be effective.  One of the simplest yet powerful ways to get people out of the direct question and answer dynamic and into the heart of a matter is to ask them to write a letter to someone else. The trick with letter writing activities is to set them up in a way that makes participants feel invested in their letter.

To make this happen you need to establish two important things:

• The recipient of the letter must be someone worthy of writing.
• Participants need to be made to feel that the letter will be read and acted upon.

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Submitted by Steve on Wed, 2009-02-25 23:00.

One of the key concepts and features in Revelation is Activities. Activities serve as the conduit for getting the information you want from your participants, understanding participant behaviors, experiences and emotions. Every month we will feature an especially useful activity.

This month we are going to focus on a great activity for capturing participant behaviors. Behavioral activities tend to be diaries or journals where participants record what they did at a given time. The challenge with behavioral activities is making sure participants capture what you want them to, and preventing the activities from getting dull and repetitive.  We have a great activity for capturing behaviors, it's called 'Moments' and it can make diaries a lot more fun and engaging. 

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Submitted by Steve on Tue, 2009-01-06 01:50.

Welcome to 2009! Tomorrow, we will be having our first online Immersive Research class of the year (with more to follow later in the year).  One of the things I like to impress upon folks who are new to online qualitative research that online is not a methodology - it's a medium for research - just like in person is a medium. I think this is an important distinction because it frames the approach in a very different way. The online medium can support a variety of methodologies and techniques (diaries, projectives, discussions etc). Just like in person, it has strengths, weaknesses and burgeoning conventions.

Online as a medium is really strong in terms of being able to sustain interaction and engagment over time. It's also a medium where you can move from individual and group interactions at will depending on how it best serves your research.  And I believe that it's also a very good expressive reflective medium for participants.  In many studies participants comment on how much they learned about themselves.

So I am excited to guide the class through the possibilities of this new medium - and look forward to the new things I will learn from them as well.