Data are too often obscured by the assumptions we attempt to prove by their selective use. In my experience, Market Research is commissioned by people who already know what they want to do; they make data conform to their needs instead of learning from the data. Therefore the entire profession gets a bad rap, cited, perhaps contradictorily as trivial, unmoored from reality, and just that much more detritus of a cover-your-ass bureaucracy.
I have a solution: stop calling it Market Research; just call it Research.
When Microsoft Corporation spends $7B per annum on Research, people applaud it for being forward-looking. What if it spent even $700M on Market Research? My guess is that figure would seem to most to be wasteful.
This is not just a semantic trick. Nor is it lame Marketing.
Fundamentally, it’s about our relationship, in the corporation, to knowledge.
We make the mistake of putting walls around knowledge, of constraining it, of making it a slave to commerce/profit/”markets.”
“What is the size of the X,Y,Z market?” we ask. The question constrains the answer.
Answers are products of the ways in which questions are asked.
Ask instead, “what could X,Y,Z mean in the context of the future?”
Ask what data can tell you about potentialities inherent in it.
Liberate the knowledge. Help knowledge and information make you creative, not rigid.
Don’t f*ck up research by claiming it has to be about “markets.”
About Romi Mahajan
