This week I dove into four different focus groups, the kind with thousands of participants. If that sounds like a lot, it is, and if it doesn’t sound like any of the focus groups you’re accustomed to attending I’m not surprised. I’m talking about the future of consumer research. I’m talking about listening.

A Focus Group of Billions

Listening and I fell in love at first sight, over 12 years ago. Until then, I grit my teeth and tolerated a marriage of convenience with traditional research. But a love of listening has set me free. My guesstimate is I’ve listened in on hundreds of thousands of conversations these past few years, a mere fraction of the billions swarming and twining across the vast social web.

I lost faith a long time ago in traditional consumer research method’s ability to produce fresh insights. Everything about oldskool qualitative and quantitative research programs – the genesis, design, implementation and interpretation of self-reported data – promises one thing: you will almost never be surprised by what you find. Worse, you will almost never find anything close to a truly fresh insight. The kind of radically fresh insight required to ignite a more radically salient marketing.

The four listening programs I tapped into this week were for brands and businesses I work with, trying to sort out what do about their marketing program. Like almost every brand I’ve worked with in the past 7 or 8 years, the old insights we’ve been using aren’t working very well anymore. By a lot.

Consumer Hegemony

The reasons for this are plain to us all. Too much has changed in the ways brands and humans encounter each other in the world. People have left the couch and they’re not terribly interested in clicking on our shabby little stabs at digital marketing brilliance. Let’s face it – brands have ceded all meaningful control over what happens next to the very same humans we keep trying to convince there’s value in paying attention to us.

Need proof? How far do you need to move your eyes from reading this sentence to check your world? I said ‘world’ but I meant your ‘phone’ — your feeds, your emails, your articles, your search results, your texts, your movies, your songs and your Amazon orders? See what I mean. It’s over. The seismic disruption to l’ancien regime of brands in the world is complete. Together, or not, we and these freshly empowered humans have crossed a critical Rubicon of connection. Yet, 90% of the businesses who spend money on marketing remain mostly clueless about what to do about it.

Culture is Key

This is where, for me, listening comes in. In this wild alternative universe we need alternative methods for generating the insights required for a new marketing science. Fresh and actionable insights, gleaned from the same culture within which we’re tasked with converting cynical skeptics into loyal lovers of our brands.

Culture is the key word here. Recent electoral outcomes in the UK and US remind us that voter polling rarely reflects the actual state of the culture at any given time. And when was the last time your focus group insights accurately evoked something fresh for your brand to bite into. Insights with the insurgent ability to inspire marketing that both reflects and attracts what the culture feels, thinks or desires at any given time?

Listening is Seeing

Listening is different. We simply take a few relevant keywords or phrases and drop them into some listening software. Then we ping the great social wild to harvest and analyze the conversation threads we find there with those words buried somewhere in the mix. There’s no fixed stimulus. There’s no defined audience screener. The only filter is the shared language used by people when they turn to the social web for advice, information, entertainment, problem solving, evangelizing and debate.

It’s not always a pretty picture. But I bet it’s always more real than anything you’ll get behind a one-way glass in a hotel conference room filled with free pizza for fifteen. The samples we harvest typically include about 95% unusable garbage. But listening – in every category we’ve ever applied it to – inevitably uncovers insights gold, in the form of rambling, maddening and deeply passionate threads of consumer-to-consumer discourse. You have to see it to believe its richness.

We’re tapping into the zeitgeist – the culture – in a way we never had available to us before. This is a resource of unlimited potential for surfacing insights about people in the shared culture of our brands. Insights from which the opportunistic brand can create immensely differentiated cultural leverage for their marketing.

Strategy and Value

In spite of the remaining cheerleaders for traditional mass positioning, bullshit messaging (sorry…) and broadcast media budgets, there’s not a single business that should be planning to advertise their way out of this existential state of affairs we find ourselves in. These are radical times (and I’m still only speaking about the marketing ecosystem…). Our business response must be equally radical in its ability to re-think the fresh strategies required to justify spending another dime on brand or product marketing.

Last year, a smug CEO wunderkind of a red-hot brand sat in front of an SXSW audience and declaimed: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. I argue he got it exactly wrong. Strategy – business, brand, product, technology, marketing and consumer strategy – is grounded in culture like it once might have been grounded in investment models, or brand equity, shareholder value or bottom-line cost calculations.

Culture is a shifting sea, our brands but tossing boats bobbing on its waves. Strategy’s job is to leverage critical signs from the culture and transform them into signals of value, back into the seething ocean of the market. Value first for the humans we need to reach and recruit. Value then for us, the businesses we represent. Turning our the CEO’s pithiness around: culture is breakfast and strategy is the insatiable hunger for insight. And listening is the feast which invites us back, day after day, for more insightful signs from the gathering tempests of consumer need and intent.

Early Days

Listening is in its infancy, a rich and fruitful green-fields for us to explore and mine. I was lucky to be part of its earliest years as a rebel in the camp of consumer research. At iCrossing in the mid-aughts, we developed something called a Listening Profile, a richly subjective view of the consumer based upon search behaviors alone. Armed with only two data points – a keyword search term and its estimated monthly search volume – we fashioned compelling behavioral profiles of freshly imagined consumers of everything from credit cards and prescription drugs to American-made automobiles and top-shelf news magazines.

A few years later I tagged along with the brilliant analysts at Wunderman to develop a truly global Listening Platform for one of our network’s AORs. At one point, we were collecting conversational media in 15 different markets and 7 different languages. Each night we rolled up the synthesized data into a centrally managed insights engine in New York and dove in fresh each morning to mine for actionable consumer, market and brand insights.

This is Not My Beautiful Brand

Since then, I’ve developed listening research programs for over 50 brands and businesses. In almost every case, the insights we surfaced made brand, product and marketing managers react the same way: denial and dismissal. At least initially.

When we first present the fresh insights and supporting evidence (in the form of verbatim samples) they inevitably say – “we’ve never seen that”. Or, “our customers don’t think that”. Or, “we would never say that”. My perennial fave is, “our current research doesn’t show this”.

Then, in almost every case, they come around. They become smitten with a tool that offers such a startling propensity for mining fresh insights. Insights which can inform almost everything we ever do or say again, once we start feeding them into our radically re-imagined marketing machines.

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Next up in our running series on the radical marketing imperative we’ll share what we do with these fresh insights from listening. Critically, they inform the creation of a different kind of consumer profiling and activation planning model. A model designed to ensure our fresh insights are actioned to produce the some very old-fashioned outcomes like traffic, purchases, brand affinity, shares, repeats, retention and LTV. Outcomes, I think we’d all agree, are increasingly difficult to achieve with anything less than a re-imagined new marketing method. A new marketing fueled by the insights required to generate fresh value, for both humans and brands, in this ever-morphing mad, mad world we inhabit together.