This was an exciting thing to read yesterday. If P&G, “the world’s biggest researcher,” understands the value of a heretical model for learning, then there’s hope for the rest of the corporate world. People are irrational, so culling information from them through purely dogmatic, rational means asking a series of objective questions with a finite answer set will deliver some good information on what people say they do. It won’t tell you why or under what conditions.
What we do is contextualize human behavior. We put all the rigor necessary into the quantitative design that ensures everyone has “numbers” to report, but we believe the real magic of consumer discovery happens in the conversation. Now, more than ever before, that conversation is online, so through a series of audits and harvesting tools, and proprietary technological engagements – in home, online, and in the retail environment – we can get the full picture of how people think, decide, and live. It takes both: the generalized, contextual learning of qualitative and the detailed, specific information of quantitative. When you put those together, that’s real cloud computing. You discover much, much more when you understand that behavior is conditional.
http://adage.com/article/news/p-g-surveys-fade-consumers-reach-brands-social-media/149509/
