“You must have mis-recruited me,” says Chris Forrest of qualitative house The Nursery, “I’m not sure there is lots of innovation in qualitative.”

Moreover, he feels there’s no need for innovation: “Qualitative research is quite evolved… a major tool for us is the good old focus group…it’s just a very good way to get people to interact with each other.”

But far from being a Luddite Forrest is innovating, it just takes him a while to acknowledge this. And that’s not dissimilar from the initial reaction we get from others we spoke to.

So, where’s the innovation?
There are two emerging areas of innovation in qualitative, and both are online: hybrid techniques that capture quantitative and increasingly qualitative information; and, techniques that capitalise on web 2.0 and the increasingly participatory nature of the web.

These reflect some emerging ‘truths’. The fact that emotions play a more significant role in decisions than rational quantitative surveys suggest, hence the use of a hybrid model to infuse the data with emotional feedback. The fact that consumer presence and attention is shifting online, hence the use of online as a data collection method not just for quantitative data. And the extension of ethnographic techniques online where self-expression is abundant.

Qualitative agencies are starting to embrace online. As Sandrine McClure of Reperes (one of the first agencies in Second Life) puts it: “We’ve moved away from the ‘let’s do qual. the way we used to do it and let’s put it on the internet’ to now learning how to do it online properly.”

Hybrid: more than the sum of the parts
So-called hybrid techniques are not a recent innovation. Quantitative practitioners have included qualitative elements in questionnaires for some time to source rich, unprompted data. But here’s the difference: the new hybrid is driven by the qualitative folks.

For Forrest at least, the motive for developing hybrid techniques was defensive as well as progressive: “[we developed hybrid] because nobody is using all the theory we currently have about how the brain works, and we were going to conferences and finding that quanties were raiding the qual. toolbox…to make quant. surveys more interesting – they were taking some of our pie!”

Forrest uses hybrid techniques for brand communications work. They comprise three projective techniques: word association; a proximity/predisposition measure; and a semiotics-based picture sort based on the work of Gerald Zaltman. McClure deploys hybrid studies, which are similarly based on projective techniques, when developing brand platforms for new brands.

Qual 2.0
The humble blog, that bastion of self-expression, has really taken off as a platform for qualitative exploration.

Sven Arn of H,T,P Concept refers to his offering as a ‘focus blog’ and often sees it as a pre-group, a place for consumers to accurately report on product usage and discuss issues ahead of a traditional focus group: “You’re a lot closer to the moment of consumption using this technology…and the great thing about it is it takes place in their own time.” The ability for consumers to upload photos and rich media only adds to its attractiveness.

But why bother with the subsequent focus group at all? Arn says, and others tend to agree, that the humble focus group will be around for a while: “…one thing that we found doesn’t work in a blog…as soon as you start asking lots of questions, it ends up being a question and answer session and people lose their involvement, you don’t get a lot of depth.”

Unlike Arn, McClure often uses her ‘home use’ blogs standalone. Used for qualitative product testing, they are far superior to the paper diary due to their interactivity. In fact she recalls how interactivity transformed the prospects of a breakfast product. During testing most reported that the product was ‘disgusting’. But then one person came up with a preparation method that significantly improved the taste and texture. Needless to say the client was happy with this random act of co-creation!

McClure sees qualitative 2.0 as an enduring phenomenon, and one that is becoming increasingly mainstream among consumers (no longer youth-centric) and agencies.

But let’s balance this unfettered enthusiasm with a clientside perspective. Crispin Beale, recently appointed head of Facts International but hitherto a career client (Royal Mail, BT and a major electronics retailer), puts it succinctly: “online communities have been more successful than I thought they would be.”

Assessing innovation
Innovation is all very good. Clients say they want it. And we know that in competitive markets with a low barrier to entry (i.e. MR), the most innovative players tend to thrive.

Forrest, however, takes issue with the notion that clients always want it: “It’s been a truism in the industry for a number of years that if you want to win a proposal then you recommend lots of interesting methodologies…but the client says they only have budget for the focus groups. You win the project on the sizzle stuff but then they don’t do the sizzle stuff…clients like to feel they are buying something funky.”

Beale takes issue with this: “[As a client] we were always looking for innovation.” And he didn’t buy any of the arguments about innovative techniques being too risky to try: “…it’s very much talking to a network of peers, finding out who’s been using new techniques. Then if something new can give you a competitive advantage, you just try things on a small scale.”

Informed buyers would, Beale says, belong to client networks and discuss the efficacy of new techniques: “…sometimes we’ll say I’ll give it a go and then next time say it’s your turn.” Moreover, “…it’s not just the techniques, it’s the individuals. And if you get individuals that you trust and respect within the industry…then you’re more predisposed.”

McClure provides a balancing view: “Innovating still takes a leap of faith, it takes confidence. [Clients] need to have faith in your agency and confidence in themselves [to be able to sell it internally].” That said, as the number of success stories presented in conferences and publications increases, clients will no longer have to rely on that intuitive sixth sense for internal justification.

Hy Mariampolski of Qualidata, a specialist in ethnography, has more issues with interpretation than techniques: “Most practitioners don’t have the foggiest notion of how to interpret projective techniques…I’m looking for a higher level of interpretation, not a higher level of analysis.” As an example, he cites a shower study where they tried to understand why a person washed their hair five times, something only made clear through observation. The interpretation, that showering was a self-nurturing behaviour, well beyond basic functional need, fundamentally changed the category.

Beale welcomes more actionability: “…sometimes as an industry we get very, very tied up in specific methodologies, whereas what we should be getting tied up in is how we used those insights to make money or save money.”

A few months ago, during a podcast recording, Jem Fawcus of the innovative Firefish was asked about his attitude to risk. I naturally assumed that as an entrepreneur he would be pro risk-taking. After all, he and business partner Allison had taken big personal risks to establish their agency. But Jem surprised me with his anti-risk stance: “agencies are there to minimise client risk”.

It took me a few moments to realise he was right. But, as someone who’s an advocate of experimenting to drive innovation, which invariably involves risk, I believe that I was also right, and that risk-taking and the tolerance of mistakes should be an essential characteristic of the industry.

In the words of Sir Ken Robinson, the inspirational educator and innovator, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

Managing risk
I am essentially calling for researchers to be given a license to innovate and be creative. In effect, for management in research organisations, as well as in client marketing, product and MR teams, to explicitly and sincerely tolerate risk and mistakes. Because until we find the perfect approach to addressing client issues, we should always be looking to improve through trial and error.

But that’s not to advocate risk-taking at all costs. That would be silly. Even the most ardent supporters of innovation would agree to sensible limits. In fact, when I recently emailed a prolific industry innovator a story about how someone at Google managed to lose the company $1m by mistake, something that one of the founders brushed off as a cost of their experimentation culture, my contact remarked that “luckily for them $1m is neither here nor there”.

It comes down to culture
There’s no fast track to creating a culture of innovation. It takes time. It takes persistence. It takes top level support.

“I believe a creative culture comes from combining skills that don’t normally come together and making sure that people don’t become too habitual in their working practices,” Derek Leddie, The Leading Edge

In time, though, the benefits do flow through:

“We were looking for a new way of measuring the equity of our brands. Repères took the risk of researching and developing a completely new approach. They asked for minimal development investment. Today we have undertaken 15 different projects with them and they have a licensed product that is selling well to other clients,” Mark Whiting, Moët Hennessy.

The client factor
Some naysayers among you may point to the power of clients to kill innovation. While that is true, the good news is that an increasing number of brands are picking up on the innovation vibe, including P&G, Tesco, Apple and Google, to name but a very few. Brands that not only like their agencies to exhibit similar traits but in many cases expect them to.

And the interesting thing is that as online brands proliferate and grow in influence and prominence, so does a culture of experimentation as symbolised by the term ‘beta’ (a label designed to warn users that websites/applications are not in final form and may contain errors).

As Mark Jones, managing director of travel and entertainment brand lastminute.com explains:

“One of the things that the lastminute.com brand represents is innovation. We don’t claim that everything put out there works first time…we’re not afraid of innovating and even getting it wrong amongst certainly a closed user group.”

Finance brand egg.com shares a similar culture, as profiled at last year’s Congress.

The pay-off
But can risk-taking and innovation lead to financial prosperity? Well, let’s take a look at an extreme example, Google, only eight years old, but already making around $6bn in annual profits. All driven by a culture built on systemic innovation. A culture that attracts and retains the best engineers, by giving staff 20% time to design and develop their own initiatives (most of their new products originate from this source), and ensuring that ideas are only ever internally shot down on the basis of robust, quantitative, objective data. A culture that embraces risk and mistakes, and sees them as the inconsequential cost of progress, a bit like a child trying to walk despite continually falling down.

But, you say, that’s hardly a relevant reference for the research community. Well, that’s the kicker. Google and the MR industry share the same mission: both are designed to quickly get people to the information they need. The only difference is, MR currently adds meaning.