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In our corporate world of increasing demands for accountability and the pressure that comes with it, a pandemic is spreading fast across all levels of companies’ middle management. What’s even more alarming is that it’s spread all the way up to top management in many organizations.
You can identify the victims through the initial symptoms of general indecisiveness, insecurity and total lack of a point of view on any of the issues that really matter. In most incidents, these symptoms quickly turn into complete decision paralysis and a severe phobia for anything outside the realm of convention. I’m talking about ‘fear’, fear with a capital ‘F’. Tragically, the implications are devastating for creative thinkers and doers out there.
Frankly speaking, many of them are not allowed to do what they’re meant and paid to do – to create. No. They’re in fact asked to duplicate and spread the conventions we’re all too familiar with: the very conventions holding brands and businesses back from fulfilling their potential. What really gets me is that we in this day and age still allow systematic abuse of original thinking and expression in what is generally an accepted research method called ‘pre-testing’. Common sense and modern neuro-science co-wrote the death certificate for this method long ago and yet it’s still alive and kicking, resuscitated and resurrected by the victims of fear.
Don’t get me wrong, research can be a wonderful insight source if it’s conducted intelligently. However, I find ‘pre-testing’ in most shapes and forms directly detrimental to original ideas and creativity. And I’ve yet to work with a research company that has managed to get me to rethink my position on this topic. More about my position on pre-testing here.
The following clip from Boston agency Arnold shows what ‘pre-testing’ systematically does to creativity. Apple didn’t pre-test its famous “1984” commercial. Would the world have been the same today if it had? Maybe. Maybe not.
(un)common sense and bravery 
I’ve been kicking off on this one over here in the comments section Fred. Gauntlet has been thrown.
http://tinyurl.com/2be5xz
I think another major issue is that too many research companies are literal in the task they have been set by the client.
Rather than truly explore the breadth and depth of issues – they literally get straight to the point and don’t investigate with any level of depth so what you often get back is “They like it” or “They don’t like it” with no clear understanding why people responded that way or what other implications/opportunities/possibilities could be explored.
Of course not all researchers or clients are like this – but they have a moral obligation to find out the whole facts and issues without any sense of bias, because otherwise it makes a mockery of a truly powerful, liberating discipline.
Liberating?
Yep … pity alot of the time research is conducted in a way that is more about ‘containing’.
I couldn’t agree more with you Rob. And I think this clip shows clear signs of this detrimental, literal approach too many research companies take in answering their clients’ briefs. Also, there is often a complete lack of appreciation of the research contex; people [consumers] are asked questions about things in an environment which forces them to construct answers and stories that explain their behaviour in a highly rational way even though the actual behaviour is completely irrational. Need I go on?
Yes … go on … let it out
I was not expecting this profound conversation this morning. I was researching Munch and an 1890 painting I am looking at by a German Artist named Thomas Theodore Heine of a Prostitute standing on the corner of a cobble stone street and in the distance are the workers (the drones) going into the factory. There is a stream of blood running from the factory down the gutter of the street. The Prostitute is holding a bloody rag, as if her job is to cleanse the pain of these workers.
It is interesting you have chosen The Scream as your image here. Are you screaming because the world oppresses creativity? Are you screaming because of the idiots they hired in that market pre-test video? By the way, the comment of liking anything with a chimp in it says a lot. And the black chick that wanted to give away the punch line with apple sewn on the uniforms of the ones who were oppressed and brainwashed away from the logo they would be wearing.
Anyway, thank you. This was a good aside upon awakening.
Change is good and all that – but can you go back to the old colour scheme, this feels yuck! 🙂
Jason, The Scream reflects both my frustrations with a lot of research practices out there, as well as the fear a majority of middle management have of breaking the conventions that are actually stopping their brands from achieving greatness.
Rob, I know you’ve just ‘divorced’ Impact, which surely is a traumatic experience, but don’t project your emotional trauma onto the new look of my blog. It’s a fresh change. A well needed break from green…even if it’s only temporary. 😉
I sit on the naughty step!
One of my best artist friends showed me this art work and asked me what does it mean to me, The first I saw it I loved it and meant a lot to me, I couldn’t expalin what it means to me, because I got very strange and confused feeling when I saw it, just like you love someone but don’t want to see them, because they hurt you. It reminds me of lonlyness, and living the life with no love. It’s just awesome work.
quien es el creador de la obra