...a thousand words 'n' all that, as we get set for another breakfast session at Crowd DNA HQ. Find out more here and get in touch if you'd like to attend...

Date: May 19, 2016

Time: 8.15-9am

Location: Crowd DNA, 5 The Lux Building, 2-4 Hoxton Square, London N1 6NU

Get set for our next breakfast session on May 19. Titled ‘A Picture Paints…’, we’ll be taking a look at how visual platforms and new ways of analysing images help us gain a deeper understanding of consumer culture. More photos were produced in the past year than ever before in history, and images, videos, emojis and GIFS are becoming the cornerstone of language, changing the way we process, navigate and think about the world. In this session, Matilda Andersson and Laura Warby from our qual, trends and innovation team will discuss how best to go about using social platforms and visual analysis to make sense of it all, and ultimately how brands can create impact from visual insights.

This is perfect for those who are looking for a more immersive way to understand consumer culture, those with an interest in visual vocab… and those who want more from qual work than just what people say with words. It’ll be colourful, instructive and to the point. After all, we’ll all need some time for scoffing pastries, coffee and juice, too.

Contact Jason Wolfe if you and/or colleagues would like to attend.

Business growth means we're currently recruiting for these roles in our London office, all giving good scope to work on exciting, often global, always culturally focused projects for quite literally the best set of brands in the world...

Senior consultant (qual, trends, innovation) 

This role will suit someone with an enthusiasm for combining trends work with getting hands-on interacting (interviews, ethnography, online methods etc) with consumers – aka real life people! You’ll be working as part of a skilled and friendly team on ad hoc projects for seriously exciting brands in the media, tech, fashion, alcohol, entertainment and finance fields. There’s flexibility at the level we bring people in for this role, but would assume you’re currently somewhere between high end SRE level and mid RM level.

What we’re after:

– Track record of insight fieldwork (groups, interviews, ethnography, digital methods – we don’t necessarily expect you to have covered all of these, however)

– An aptitude for project and client management

– A tangible enthusiasm for presenting work, running workshops and for reaching bold conclusions that combine creativity and good commercial sense for our clients 

– First rate writing skills (we expect you to be contributing to our blog and producing reports)

– Appetite for trends spotting and trends dissemination 

– Hungry also to learn about and apply behavioural thinking and cultural strategy

Associate director/senior consultant (quant & analytics)

An exciting opportunity has opened up for an enthusiastic and confident researcher to join our quant and analytics team (as per this opening being titled as either associate director or senior consultant, there’s some flexibility over the seniority of the role). The successful candidate will get to work on a wide range of ad hoc projects for some of the coolest brands on planet earth. We’re looking for someone with a good understanding of quantitative methodologies, the ability to apply a broad range of techniques and some creativity to the process.

The ideal candidate will have:

– Four plus year’s experience (think high end SRE through to senior RM)

– Able to manage and execute projects successfully from kick off to completion, including presenting with confidence

– An inquisitive and analytical mind, and a love for turning data into compelling stories

– An enthusiasm for thinking beyond the obvious, towards new ways to collect and share data

– Either experience of, or an ambition to, line manage others

– Keen to blend quantitative work with trends, qual and innovative means of creative delivery

Executive (quant & analytics)

This is a entry level opportunity for an enthusiastic and confident individual to join our quant and analytics team. The successful candidate will be responsible for drafting questionnaires, project managing quantitative fieldwork, and analysing data to draw out compelling research findings. You’ll be supported by senior team members to develop your research skills, as you assist on a range of key accounts across categories such as media, tech, retail, alcohol and entertainment brands. While a starter level role, the ideal candidate is likely to exhibit the following:

– Relevant work experience/placements/internships

– An enthusiasm for working with data

– An inquisitive and analytical mind, but also the creativity to think about new and compelling ways to present work and tell stories

– Highly organised, with excellent attention to detail and the ability to work under pressure

– Someone who’s positive, keen to develop, and who can operate with equal ease as part of a team or working autonomously

Project manager

We’re seeking someone for a new project manager role at Crowd DNA, entailing working along our insight consultants, strategists and creatives to ensure we deliver high standard work for our clients at all times. Here’s what we’re after:

– A track record of working in insight; either as a project manager, field manager, or perhaps as a consultant who now favours a switch to the project management side of things!

– Demonstrable skills in managing complex multi-market projects; including timelines, suppliers, clients and budgets

– A deft multi-tasker with an agile approach to working alongside researchers and creatives

– Keen and capable working with diverse digital platforms

– So organised it’s insane…

All roles come with competitive salaries and other benefits; and clear paths to promotion and to new opportunities. It’s an entrepreneurial and energised environment, fast paced and collaborative. If you fancy working in a place where setting the agenda for the future of insight and innovation is coded into the culture, please do get in touch. andy@crowdDNA.com

From open sourcing to 'always in beta', Eric Shapiro, senior consultant in our creative delivery team, explores what insight can learn from the agile ways of digital development...

There’s no hiding from the fact that the most important products of the last 20 years all have zeros and ones in common. As the entire world has moved digital, the way we build, test, refine and consume has had to adapt. More than ever, the pressure is on the process: translating ideas into action – and at speed. The results, from Facebook and Google to Angry Birds and Minecraft – can be spectacular successes at relatively minimal upfront cost, and rarely a day goes by where a piece of development work isn’t in the news.

It’s therefore no surprise that insight, along with most other industries, view technology startup culture with equal degrees of admiration and envy. And while lip service is often paid to the link between insights and tech, we’re too often slow, or reluctant, to apply digital thinking to research processes. With this in mind, here’s how understanding digital can help make our insight a bit more Minecraft and a lot less Microsoft Vista.

1. Start with a sentence

Great products have an extremely clear vision and a solid base which can adapt to change and grow. Twitter is a micro messaging platform. Facebook connects you with friends. From a simple and solid base, you can build – which is why summing up your start up in a sentence is a big deal. While clarity at the outset helps with the later process of building, testing, and refining, it also helps when your product goes ‘viral’. The best and most successful products can deal with this – ones that fail often can’t (anybody remember Ello?). The insight learning: distill briefs and their responses to their core to get everyone on board at the beginning, and then revisit the process at the end to ensure your findings have a consistent and solid message.

2. Plan more, do less 

In the context of quick turn-around briefs and instant insights, it’s often the scoping phases that get pinched in favour of more time in field and the hope of more analysis and output building later on. However, if we switch this on its head, and spend more time identifying what we already have, and putting into place a watertight and signed off plan of action there’s far less likelihood of running into problems at the analysis stage, which as a consequence can be faster and more focused. This is where digital thinking wins out. This may be borne out of technological necessity in most instances (there’s no point building a perfect square peg if in can only fit in a round hole), but it shows how trading off more thinking for less doing leads to better outcomes.

3. Consider agile

For the last few years, ‘agile’ has been the buzzword of the digital industries. In a nutshell, it’s about producing a bare minimum product offering, then iteratively adding layers by building, testing, and refining the basic concept. It’s a brilliant, user-centric way of creating that keeps things simple and uncomplicated. As the name suggests, it’s also quick; projects are measured in days rather than weeks. What’s more, it links perfectly with research and focuses the role of insight. A team of researchers, creatives and product owners work together closely to repeatedly build and improve a concept until you end up with a final ‘phase’ that’s taken to market. At Crowd DNA we’ve successfully use this approach to build a set of creative guidelines and look forward to introducing it to other areas. Agile methods are also a key element in design thinking, a similarly innovative approach that involves building products using human behaviours as a starting point, rather than a proving ground in the later stages.

4. Use collaborative tech

Digital project management requires a high degree of attention and quality control to ensure things are built properly and bugs can be quickly squashed. This has led to a raft of innovation in project management tools and software to help make the process seamless. At the heart of tools like Basecamp, Gliffy, Google Docs, and many others, is a collaboration ethos where responsibilities are clearly defined, shared and work together towards a single aim. Like any product, a piece of insight needs to be bug proof in order to be effective and do its job, and embracing collaboration can help us ensure our products are of exceptional standard.

5. Pivot your ideas

Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and blogger, is responsible for defining a lot of the characteristics of what he terms ‘the lean startup’, a model which digital and non digital companies are increasingly associating themselves with. One of the central definitions of the lean startup is the ability to change a product’s primary use, rather than scrap or rebrand it if it fails to make an impact in the market. While this method – known as pivoting – often refers to entire companies or large products, the principles are applicable to research. The lesson here: consider the insights beyond the primary aim. If they don’t prove the hypothesis or the argument, what else do they prove? Is there more than one story angle in the data? Which story is going to be the most compelling to the intended audience? If you need inspiration, look no further than great pivoting examples like Pinterest (originally a shopping app) and Groupon (originally a crowdfunding platform) to show how changing direction can lead to success.

6. Be ‘always in beta’

Finally, digital industries are embracing the notion of the ‘never finished product’ – that a service can be continually improved and adapted towards perfection, rather than ever claiming to have reached it upon launch. We’ve long championed the idea that research needs to be socialised and adapted if it’s to have an impact; that no single finding or deliverable can ever be said to nail the problem forever; therefore it’s great to see this idea becoming increasingly put into practice. Innovations such as YouTube’s fantastic 360 service show how even the most established and successful products can always be re-evaluated and added to.

Last week, we served pastries, coffee and crisp thoughts on how to get culturally attuned through data. Charlotte Burt, consultant in the quant and analytics team summarises the key take-outs...

Most people have at some point thought about what superpower they would most like to have. Invisibility? The ability to fly? How about the power to read people’s minds? What if we told you, we could grant you the power to know what people are thinking just from the use of numbers? That’s exactly what Syann and Claire, director and associate director respectively in our quant and analytics team, shared with some early risers at Crowd’s most recent breakfast session.

Using data to tell stories with context: whilst qual techniques are often the go-to method for providing a deep understanding of behaviour, the beauty of quant research is that it can place findings in a more representative context and really broaden our understanding of a particular topic. How do we do this?

1. Think about the outputs – it’s no use thinking about what outputs you want once the research is completed. This needs to happen in the early stages and it’s important to ask yourself: what will the outputs look like? Where can numbers give me the most value? And what data will really help bring the story to life?

2. Use methods tactically – qual and quant often go hand in hand so think about the best ways the different methods can complement each other and give you the best insights.

3. Layer your questions – asking the same question in a number of different ways will really tap into the nuances in people’s opinions. Be implicit. Explicit. And everything in between.

Getting beyond claimed behaviour: there is often a misconception that you can’t truly find out what makes someone do the things they do just by asking them. Wrong. There are ways of gathering and interrogating data that allow us to explore the thought process people go through, and statistics are at the heart of Crowd’s approach. So how can this be done?

1. Trade-offs – presenting people with ‘trade-off’ scenarios (or choice based conjoint analysis, if you’re feeling fancy) can help you analyse the paths people take in their decision making and isolate what factors are the most important to them.

2. Segmentation – grouping people on their attitudes and behaviours (rather than their demographics) is a great way to understand how people differ in their opinions.

3. Key drivers – if you want to find out the relationship between different attributes and what is really making people do the things they do then key drivers analysis is the way to go!

Questionnaire design to gain cultural understanding: everyone has biases. Some we know and some are hidden deep in the depths of our subconscious. The key to great questionnaire design is to recognise what biases might be at play – both in our own minds and in the minds of others when they are responding. This can be tricky, but the following tips can help:

1. Know your audience – think about the type of language that your desired audience are familiar with. Set the right tone and make sure that the look and feel of the survey is relevant.

2. Use frameworks – being mindful of behavioural science and cultural strategy is crucial. Every question you ask should have a purpose and it’s important to consider how each question will be interpreted.

3. Lay the foundations – never approach quant research cold. Whether it’s undertaking up front qual, desk research, speaking to experts or simply reflecting on your own thoughts and opinions, always come armed with information before designing a questionnaire.

As the morning drew to a close and the final croissants and coffees were snapped up, the real question now is… what to do with these new found super powers?

Keen to look into the White House’s crystal ball, Crowd DNA associate director and trends writer Anna Chapman went to hear Alec Ross, former senior advisor for innovation, talk at the LSE Literary Festival...

Predicting the future can be a tricky business: you’re bound to get caught out. But that’s OK, says Alec Ross, because our future selves will be more forgiving of human errors. It’s a useful disclaimer for someone who’s promoting a book called The Industries Of The Future, inspired by his world travels as senior advisor on innovation to Hillary Clinton.

Ross believes that we’ll get used to the lack of privacy brought by the digital world and value the transparency coming in its place. Everyone will experience some sort of social media scandal, he says, but because we’re becoming more accepting, it won’t be such a big deal. Just look at how our attitudes to inhaling changed between Clinton and Obama’s presidency campaigns.

Being open isn’t only important to our future standpoint, it’s also key to a successful economy (bear in mind that Ross did spend four years in the White House). He thinks skilled workers will flood out of authoritarian countries. Soon the world won’t be carved up geographically into developed and developing, he says; instead we’ll be classifying markets as open and closed. Indonesia is somewhere he thinks will be successful for this reason.

So how can we future-proof ourselves for this open world? Ross believes that the key to Mark Zuckerberg’s success is that he’s a talented behavioural psychologist AND a computer scientist. He says we’ll need a similar combination of seemingly disparate skills, plus languages and the ability to code, so we can communicate in a data-driven global economy.

Controlling big data will be a big deal in the information age (like land was in the agricultural age or iron in the industrial). However, thanks to cloud robotics and AI, hard-working droids will provide cheap labour, stealing white-collar as well as blue-collar jobs. Ross’s dad is a lawyer in Hurricane, West Virginia, and he thinks a robot will be able to do his job in the next 10 years.

But it’s not all bad news for us soon-to-be unemployed humans – at least we’ll have our health. Ross predicts that the next trillion-dollar industry will be built on genetic code. He’s particularly optimistic about the commercialisation of genomics, despite ethical issues around designer babies and liquid biopsies (a blood test that can spot cancer cells before symptoms develop, 1/100th the size of anything than can picked up by an MRI scan).

If you’re interested in learning more about the innovations that Ross thinks are set to shape our lives, further topics are tackled in The Industries Of The Future. And remember if he’s got it wrong, he predicts that you’ll go easy on him.

Great to be able to share some video content from our major study, in partnership with Facebook IQ, on how technology is transforming lives...

Facebook IQ – Tech Transformations for 2016 And Beyond

Come along to our next breakfast session for thoughts and ideas on bringing culture to quantitative research...

Date: February 25, 2016

Time: 8.15-9am

Location: Crowd DNA, 5 The Lux Building, 2-4 Hoxton Square, London N1 6NU

Roll up for our second breakfast session. Titled ‘Colourful Numbers’, this time we’ll be focusing on ways to ensure quantitative data provides a culturally relevant understanding of consumer behaviours and motivations, with Syann Cox and Claire Moon from our quant and analytics team discussing how a more sophisticated approach to outputs helps data to tell stories with more context, how statistical methods can get us beyond claimed behaviours, and how an informed, trends-aware approach to questionnaire design enables a richer exploration of audiences and occasions.

This is perfect for those who are looking for new ways to understand consumer behaviours, those with an interest in decision making processes… and those who want more from quant work than bar charts. It’ll be quick, to the point – and there’s pastries, coffee and stuff too.

Contact Jason Wolfe if you and/or colleagues would like to attend.

Want to do smart and creative things with data for amazing brands? We've an entry level opening in our quant and analytics team...

This is a entry level opportunity for an enthusiastic and confident individual to join our quant and analytics team. The successful candidate will be responsible for drafting questionnaires, project managing quantitative fieldwork, and analysing data to draw out compelling research findings. You’ll be supported by senior team members to develop your research skills, as you assist on a range of key accounts across categories such as media, tech, retail, alcohol and entertainment brands.

While a starter level role, the ideal candidate is likely to be able to point to relevant work experience/placements/internships and an enthusiasm for working with data. We’re looking for someone with an inquisitive and analytical mind, but also the creativity to think about new and compelling ways to present work and tell stories.

You’ll need to be highly organised, with excellent attention to detail and the ability to work under pressure. We want someone who’s positive, keen to develop, and who can operate with equal ease as part of a team or working autonomously.

Located in our Hoxton Square London office, the role come with a competitive salary and other benefits; and clear paths to promotion and to new opportunities. It’s an entrepreneurial and energised environment, fast paced and collaborative. If you fancy working in a place where setting the agenda for the future of insight and innovation is coded into the culture, please do get in touch – andy@crowdDNA.com