Editorial: Pop Science Books

Reg Baker in his inevitable style posted a wonderfully forthright blog piece (click here to read) bemoaning the industries taste in books, pointing out that a great majority of the books in the list of nominees for the books that had the most transformative impact on market research were Popular Science and highlighted how unscientific some of these types of books are, championing potentially totally bogus theories that have not been subjected to proper scientific scrutiny. 

Now I can total understand his emotional reaction to this. I have exactly the same response when I go into health food shops and see all homoeopathic remedies on the shelf and am horrified that they can get away with their often totally bogus healing claims that have not been subjected to any rigorous medical trials.

But I have a few points on this that I thought I would share:

1. Books are not apples:  and in most cases not in the class of homoeopathic style remedies, one or two bad ones do not rot the whole crop.  Whilst there are some very bad pop science books, there are also some really brilliant ones that help, as Tom Ewing has pointed out, eloquently digest and explain often very complex subject matter in a clear and understandable way. To draw over riding conclusions about pop science books on the bases of analysis of parts of the sample is in itself is bad science.

What is the next big thing?

I asked the panel of judges of the my research transformation awards, who were made up of industry thought leaders and innovators from across the global market research industry, to make their prediction of what they thought would be transforming market research in the future. There were some very interesting and intelligent thoughts and so I thought I would share these predictions with you:

The Winners of The Research Transformation award

These are the result of the Research Transformations awards which I was asked to organise for a special session at the NewMR Festival.   These awards were initiated to celebrate the things that have had (or are having!) the most transformative impact on market research.  The awards have been judged by an esteemed panel of 30 leading research innovators and thought leaders from across the industry.  The full list of judges is published below and I would like to thank them all for their time and active contributions to these awards.

This is the judging survey and if you would like to CAST YOUR OWN VOTES on these awards please do,  and I hope to be able to publishing the results of this open vote in the future, it may be interesting to compare the open vote with those of the judging panel:
http://qsurvey.gmisurveys.com/dc/index.html?p=jwoYlg

The big ideas that are transforming how we think about market research
The first award is for the big ideas that are transforming how we think about market research. Over the few years a number of major ideas and theme have emerged that have shaped the way we think.

1. Listening rather than asking
The emergence of social media has opened up a whole new viewpoint on how to conduct research moving away from asking questions to listening to what people are saying.  What is has spawned a whole new  industry monitoring and measuring and analysing what we are saying when we are not asked questions by market researcher.  Listening is becoming more important than asking.

2. The hidden decision making process of our brain 

We are slowly learning more and more about how our brains work and we are finding out that the way we decide things and make decisions is a lot more complicated that we think and a lot of it happens outside of our consciousness.  This thought is really transforming how many market researchers think about conducting research, no longer can we rely on simply asking questions we have look further.
3. Information can be beautiful 

We in the market research agency can be labelled by the outside world an boring numbers people but the arrival of inforgraphics onto the scene and new story telling technique have started to make our industry a whole lot more sexy!

This is the full list of nominations.... 

Wisdom of the crowds: Discovering that groups can make intelligent decisions

Information can be beautiful: The idea that data can be sexy, and there are a lot more creative ways of presenting data than a bar chart

The hidden decision making process of our brain: Leaning that our concious mind is not always in control of our decisions

Herd thinking: Understanding the power of social influence

Co-creation: We can work together to create things

Gamification: Using gaming techniques to get respondents to think more effectively

Listening rather than asking: The idea of gaining incite from the mass of communicaton happening on the internet and using observation and means of conducting research

Big data: The emerging opportunity to consolidate information from all sources of sources to undertake super analysis

Thin slicing: The idea that you can generate a lot more incite than you think from very small data sources

The communitisation of market research: We are all sharing a lot more ideas & information with things like twitter, linkedin and blogs and this is "superscalling" our industry