The way market researchers have traditionally presented survey data in slide after slide of complex tables and charts can best be described as mind-numbing cruelty. The usual charts we see around are nowhere near as interesting as this one. It is cruel to clients to impose dull complex charts on them. It is also a pretty ineffective way for our industry to communicate. In this post, I offer some suggestions based on Fast and Slow Thinking.
I have another life, outside of SBR, as a novelist, and my novels are historical fiction*. Recently I gave a workshop on turning fact into fiction at a literary festival in Victoria. As I was working on it, Sue pointed out to me that several of my charts about turning ‘fact’ into compelling fiction are relevant to our research communication – where we try to tell a story.
Communications testing is one of our most popular services. We test lots of written communications from Fact Sheets to Usage Instructions and Packaging Labels, digital and in print. It is part of our “Sense” suite of services. Daniel Kahneman’s ideas about thinking fast and slow - ‘System 1 and System 2’ - help us to design different tests for different written material.
The message of this blog is that the recent trend to calling researchers and agencies 'vendors' is bad for research.
Call them vendors they will sell; call us research designers and we will think.
Clients keep telling researchers they are doing too much selling and not enough thinking. Three examples:
Further to my earlier blog on text analytics, I have just discovered this - IBM Watson combining content analysis with tone analysis. Very clever.
"The Tone Analyzer service helps individuals understand the linguistic tones of their writing. The service uses linguistic analysis to detect and interpret emotional, social, and writing cues that are located within the text. The service also offers rhetorical suggestions for an author to improve the intended tone of their message.
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/tone-analyzer.html
Here is a copy of the article that I wrote for the industry magazine Research News about text analytics: Will text analytics replace qualitative analysis?
Some extracts: