How to Manage Teams Remotely
Based on our own experience, published research and our own conversations with managers and employees, the problem isn't work from home - it's managing from home.
Latest
2024: Adapting to Change with Integrity
It's too late, according to the Curb Your Enthusiasm meme, to wish you a happy new year, and in any event, that feels just a little presumptuous, doesn't it? But it's not too late to speculate about what 2024 is going to be like,
Politics & College Selection - an Update
It turns out, we were right. Sorry, Scott. Last August, in response to a discussion on the Vox Media podcast, Pivot, between co-hosts Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway about the salience about state level abortion bans, we conducted a small survey of young people either evaluating which colleges to apply
The Reality of Remote Work
And the problem with vibes-based data analysis We're back with the newsletter & blog - expect to see us on a more regular schedule (bi-weekly!) with a mix of announcements, "that survey doesn't say what you think it says" analysis, and strategic thinking about
Inclusive & Accessible Research
How to Set Up Focus Group Facilities, In Person Ethnography, and In Person Interviews Thanks for following along as we dive into inclusive and accessible research! If you missed our earlier posts about how to conduct inclusive and accessible research, you can find them here and here. It’s been
How EVs could disrupt the car category hierarchy
Hi, happy 2023! A funny thing happened over the holidays: I discovered that electric cars remind me of vodka. Several years ago I did some work testing campaigns for the vodka brand Smirnoff. In talking to vodka drinkers, we discovered the category was essentially a vertical stack, with well brands
Why work with us?
We're researchers and strategists who help leaders make big decisions. That's it. That's the pitch. Our partners come to us because they have to choose a direction for their brand or business. They want to address new markets around the world, appeal to new
Politics & College Selection
Do politics play a role in how students evaluate their college choices? The other day I was listening to the latest Pivot podcast — Scott Galloway said he thought it was pretty unlikely that a state’s abortion regulations would have any impact on students’ decisions about where to go to
Civic Trust is a (Legal) Design Problem
Reflections on a Primary Election in a Small Town June 28 was a primary election day to select governor and lieutenant governor candidates in the state of New York. I am what’s called an election inspector in Suffolk County, New York, which means when you come in to your
The “New Normal” of Qualitative Research
What we found in our competitive review of the market research industry Especially over the last couple of years, when everything was about, well, coping — just getting on with it — we had sort of lost track of what was happening for the broader market research industry. We saw companies and
The Medium is the Mask-age
There won't be one way to be after the pandemic, because there was no one way to be before it - and certainly not during it. Masks are just one example. We’re in that in-between space, again, which seems to come just before a new wave of
Inclusive & Accessible Research:
How to Set Up Remote Interviews, Focus Groups, and Digital Diaries As we’ve written about before, we’re exploring how we can be more inclusive and accessible in conducting research. Here are some initial things for any team to consider when attempting to make research more inclusive and accessible:
Blog
Trust, Community and Your Customers
We should probably finish learning how to do community well in web 2.0 before we take all our bad habits with us to web3. In 2009, when we first started talking to consumers using online video diaries, the platforms were set up to function a lot like early Facebook
Blog
Normalize talking to people
We're done apologizing. Last week someone got in touch about attending the Qual360 conference in DC this spring and they were offering a discount, so I took a look. After scrolling through the program and the featured speakers, I was left wondering why on earth anyone would still
Blog
We Could All Use a Little Grace
Brief reflections on 2021, our plans for the future, and our faves from the cusp of 2022. Hi. 2021 ended for our little team with a grim flourish of grief, illness, and other forms of bad news, so we’ve all been simply trying to recover from that before we
Blog
A Representative Sample
We're trying to create the conditions for a truly representative sample in market research - want to help? The tl;dr - we’re building a qualitative research recruitment panel that is designed to be inclusive and accessible from the ground up. If you or someone you know
Blog
Checking our Assumptions
What marketers take for granted about how people make decisions; why it took the pandemic for researchers to adopt remote methods; the value of the beginner's perspective Only a day late this time (and we’ve switched to Substack, because, well, we want the option of alt-text on
Blog
Why Talk About Inclusive & Accessible Research?
As you probably already know, The Difference Engine conducts qualitative research, and we’ve spent some time over the past few months discussing industry trends & patterns and analyzing our own methods for running research. In a recent conversation, we concluded that there is not much information out there about
Blog
Look at My Face
Today’s lesson: Emotional Leakage and Facial Recognition Software in Market Research There are lots of ways that facial recognition technology can be put to use; but one industry that has already demonstrated a lot of interest is the marketing business. Advertisers, market researchers have dabbled in facial recognition both
Blog
“Eliminating Groupthink”
A note about a thing you don’t need to worry about and a technology you don’t need to use. I recently stumbled upon an article in Axios about how the $15 minimum wage is unpopular with swing voters. It suggested that President Biden might abandon including the proposal
Blog
Personas That Govern
Chuck Schumer has imaginary friends OH MY GOD DO USER RESEARCH DON’T SOLELY RELY ON PERSONAS https://t.co/g6VDC7e4hY — Dan Hon (@hondanhon) February 16, 2021 This pictured text is from a profile from 2007 in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg. Let’s just quote the thing: Schumer
Podcast Appearance
"Is there truth in advertising?" - Joseph Jaffe is not Famous
In December 2020, Farrah joined Joe Jaffe on Joseph Jaffe is not Famous to talk about the way we find truth in market research - and politics!
Blog
Before the Brief: How to do desk research
With a brief explanation of why you absolutely should I had such a good time explaining how to do observational research, that I thought I’d also take a moment to explain how to do secondary (a.k.a., “desk”) research. In my view, you can’t even begin to
Blog
Before the brief: Observation
The first in a limited series about what brand & communications strategists should do *before* they write a creative brief Author’s note: Yesterday I wrote a series of tweets about this, but thought it might be useful to assemble them in one short article, and address some of the