From "Me" to "We" research

Earlier this week the Marketing Society ran a very interesting "Think Differently" session on how we can apply community based principles, or "herd" thinking, not only to marketing communications but also to research methodologies.

Alex Batchelor, Marketing Society Chairman, led a lively discussion on how research methodologies should focus less on the opinions of individuals and more on the wisdom of the crowd. His presentation was based around the fundamental premise that our percpetions of ourselves are fundamentally flawed, we are our own worst witnesses. Given this fact, surely a far better approach is to research people's perceptions of eachother and we research group behaviour as well as individuals.

I thought this was a really interesting concept for which I could see many advantages and Alex furnished us with a number of great examples of the principle in action.

One of these was of research conducted into binge drinking behaviour in Newcastle. By getting binge drinkers themsleves involved in the research and asking them to observe and report back on other binge drinkers they were able to uncover insights not picked up through traditional methods.

As part of the session we were broken up into groups and asked to think about how we might apply these principles as follows:

1/ Think of a brand  

2/ Who buys this brand? 

3/ Who influences the purchase? 

4/ How do these groups interact?

My table decided on Andrex as the brand to discuss - which was quite a tricky one as talking about bottoms and bodily functions is a bit of a taboo subject! But these questions are a good staring point for anyone thinking about how herd behaviour might impact their brand.

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