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!