Quantum Thinking in MRX – instructions deliberately not included

There’s a lovely similarity between quantum mechanics and the world of market research – although unfortunately for us MRXers, being in 2 different places simultaneously is not one of them.

No. The similarity lies in Manifest Subject Decoherence.

That’s the boffins’ way of describing the Observer Effect.

(This should start to ring some bells…) In quantum physics, as soon as you observe a particle, you’re interfering. The electrons involved will be “forced” to behave like particles. And not like waves. Which is how they really behave. The particles, in effect, start to lie about what they really do as soon as you start to observe them.

The parallels are obvious to all seasoned MRXers. There’s certainly, I hope, no new information here that tells you how to extract substances from eggs… though maybe you’ll now have a new analogy to use in your next presentation.

Why do MRX participants behave like quantum particles?

9 times out of 10, they do “it” because they want to be liked. In that situation. By their peers. By the people around them. By the people asking the questions.

They’ll lie without being aware of it. To them, they are still being  truthful. They believe in what they say and do when being observed. They’ll even stand by such things even after being presented with any facts to the contrary (Factfulness anyone?)  To them they are not lieing.  But what they are telling you isn’t really what they would otherwise do or say in physical reality, in the normality of their day-to-day lives.

So what’s a poor MRXer to do?

If observation changes behaviour, how do you minimize that decoherence?

Watch Me Think has honed techniques, methodologies and processes to get as close to observerless (and near instructionless) as can currently be achieved en-masse.

We’ve updended, pared down, re-written, refactored and re-re’d most things you can think of over the last 7 years to get to where we are at now, as specialists in observing the truths in human behaviour. (And we’re still not satisfied.)

Let me unpack this for you.

Instructions not included

Mobile phones are extensions of people’s arms and part of their lives.

They are not cameras stuck on walls or on the top of TVs. They are not films crews. They are not clipboard bearing questionneers. They are not the darkened room, the table, the chairs and the damn awful coffee where divorced thinking happens about personal attitudes, perceptions and behaviours that occur in the real physics of people’s’ lives.

Mobile phones (strangely, actually) are not seen as that intrusive. They’re akin to a ‘cooker that communicates’. In other words, they are part of the furniture.

So we get people to film themselves – or their loved ones to do it for them. As do other companies, to be fair.

But we get simpler (cleverer?) than that.

1. We always ask them to film in the environment and with the people that are pertinent to the answers needed to the questions surreptitiously posed.
2. About those questions… and the use of the word “surreptitious”… it’s because we try to go as near to instruction-less as we can. Funnily enough, the less questions we ask, the more answers we get.
3. We even sometime false-task people – asking them to do something we don’t really need to know about, in order to find out something we do need to know about, and which will happen in the course of achieving that false task.It doesn’t stop there – did I mention we’ve been honing these techniques for years?
4. We can then get the respondent/s themselves to comment on what they did, by reviewing their own films. To self-analyse their own actions and statements.
5. Then we get some rather clever people to to analyze both sets of “data” – images and words. These clever folks have first hand experience in working at your coal face in the FMCG/CPG industries. Folks who happily we can now call colleagues. They will look at the “surround” not just the “focus”. They compare, contrast, synthesize, summarize.

   There’s more – of course there is… I’m sure I just mentioned those 7 years specializing in this…

6. Trump card (no, not that Trump, Top Trumps): We can also get the respondent’s peers to analyze the videos – with the respondent’s permission, of course. We can do this to see how like-minded people analyze what-people-like-them do.  It’s incredibly fascinating – and to be honest, it’s not often you can say that when you’re sitting through 3 hrs of home video :-)There’s more.
7. It’s the age of machines. So we run everything through specialized engines to extract and group meaningful concepts.  It also cracks open the video egg (no, I don’t have a thing about eggs Herr Freud). Our machine provides instant accessibility to any point, any reference, in any video, within seconds. Which you can then extract, collate, compile, collaborate, share.

Now I’ve often had to say this “method” doesn’t replace traditional MRX techniques. But to be honest I’m saying that to be nice.

For example, in certain circumstances such as protype developments, front end innovation, use of existing products to identify barriers and drivers… why on Earth would you trust a focus group to give you as meaningful, useful insights!? If you want to understand how someone uses your new or hopefully-soon-to-be-existing product, why would you directly ask them? Can someone explain that to me?

Or have we just been lucky in MRX so far using such life-alienating techniques?

Chimps picking out multiple choice answers, A B or C, can be right 33% of the time (no offence to Pan troglodytes.) So what is the % for market research successes? I don’t have the figure, but I have a shirt and I’m willing to bet.

People in front of cameras are called?

In fact, it is so utterly bizarre that for so long we have simply been asking people to ‘behave’ in front of cameras. And to perform in front in of audiences. No wonder in such situations we normally call such people “actors”.

Some very clever people have won Nobel prizes proving that what people say and then what they do do can often be 2 different things.

Of course I hear arguments that Quant Data is where the truth is at. And in some respects that can indeed be true. But aren’t we, most times, asking people about their intentions? So if you are simply transferring people’s opinions of that intention into a number, how is that then the truth? It can merely be a 1-to-1 transference of a well-meaning lie.

“What is measurable isn’t the same as what is valuable.”

Tricia Wang – predictor of Nokia’s downfall – Thick Data vs Big Data

Or this classic from the British TV Series “Yes Minister”:

Numbers are just statistics. And you can make statistics say anything. (Favourite story of mine: a professor of stats at my old university used to say he wished he could smuggle a bomb on board a plane. Purely because the chances of 2 bombs being on the same plane were infinitesimally small.)

So surely in terms of real-life behaviour it has to be about observation. Observation that places the least stress on natural behaviours, just as in Quantum physics. And it must be done in the place of real use… Married up, yes, to what people say, but not that such words are unconditionally accepted when compared to what is then being seen in tandem.

The reality is in actions. Equals and opposites. What people do. Not just what they say.

In the Physical Truth of action lies the real truth of consumer behaviour. If observed properly and minimally, if analysed correctly and not in isolation, observation need not create Manifest Subject Decoherence. And we can then access something that is much closer to the truth.

That my friends, is Quantum MRX.

Quark it up.

Alistair Vince, April 2018

Footnote:

Can other agencies copy what we do by reading this? Sure. Go ahead. Fill your boots. Be our guests.

But no-one else can claim to have the level of speciality coupled with length of experience that Watch Me Think has in this field of Quantum MRX. And if they do, they are lying 🙂 And we’re constantly refining, improving, getting better, going deeper, coming closer to the truths of observationeless behaviours. We’re experts in a specific specialized field. Other agencies? Grab your pipes and smoke it.