Marketing Lego – modular vs. craft values
When I first started out on the qualitative research path, my boss and mentor (an eminent qualitative guru of the time), instilled a rule throughout her company which was this: when writing a project proposal, we were NOT to refer to previous projects from which we might draw inspiration.
This will undoubtedly strike many as odd. What could be more natural than leveraging company experience to create a competitive proposal? Why reinvent the wheel every time one sits down to design a project? Why go through all the thinking again when there is more than a fair chance that the answer will appear startlingly similar to that which has already been written?
These were certainly my first thoughts and I recall voicing the questions. The answer was succinct and powerful – ‘you are cheating on previous clients, the client you are designing the project for and you are cheating on yourself’. In other words, by using shortcuts I was encouraging mental laziness.
By not approaching each project from the freshest possible perspective and thinking through every aspect for each specific client, I would be limiting the creativity of my approach and not engaging fully with the issues. Even though such shortcuts might produce a slick looking document, she informed me, it would be a design without heart; a lapse in discipline leading inevitably to a drop in output quality.
I wasn’t immediately convinced. However, ‘when in Rome’ and all of that, so it became my modus operandi. Now I am extremely grateful for that discipline. Over the years I have seen some dreadful research practices where research designs and discussion guides have been recycled on a near ‘search and replace’ basis. This means that the researcher isn’t acknowledging the client’s unique values, the client doesn’t get the quality they should and we move the world inexorably towards a sort of universal brand pyramid where differences become increasingly blurred.
It seems to me especially important in a ‘cut n paste’ world to champion craft values when it would be so much easier to ‘go modular’ and bolt project designs together from the proposal ‘spare parts bin’. We need to celebrate and engage our markets with differences rather than aiming everything at the same point in the bell curve. It is simply not possible for every brand to ‘own’ ‘authenticity’ or ‘comfort’ and neither is it desirable.
Qualitative research is an ‘analogue process’ – it doesn’t lend itself to digitisation, reductionism and modularity; that is what quantitative research does. Like it or not, there IS a ‘black box’ in the qualitative analysis process and it cannot be taught. Marketing skills, psychology, sociology and life experience all help, but ultimately you either get it or you don’t, and that should be perfectly okay. It would be helpful if those teaching qualitative research to college graduates would bear this in mind – please.
