Graham Booth on Research & Creative

Graham Booth is a brand strategy and communications consultant and founder of Movement, a UK consultancy established in 1997. He helps clients develop effective brand positioning and advertising through qualitative research. His clients include Coca-Cola, Aviva, Tesco, Innocent, and Paddy Power. His research has contributed to multiple IPA Effies award-winning campaigns.

So, I know that you know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. When I learned this question, I just stole it, because it’s a really big question, and it’s a beautiful way to start the conversation. But because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it the way I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—any way that you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from?

Well, it is a great question, Peter. And it’s kind of a classic qualitative question, isn’t it? Because it’s not just about the answer. It’s about how the person who’s answering the question interprets the question, because it is so open to interpretation.

My answer, I guess, is not a geographical one. I was born in South London, in the suburbs of South London. It’s pretty much like the suburbs anywhere—it could be the suburbs of Birmingham, could be the suburbs of Leeds, suburbs of Manchester. You know, it was classically bland, homogeneous, even more so than it would be now.

And I’ve always struggled with working out actually where I do come from, in geographic terms, because I’m much more interested in the sensibility and the culture and those aspects of things. So really, when I think about where I come from, it’s more kind of psychological, I suppose. Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious—I don’t mean it to—but more of a sort of psychological or personality background.

Because I think how “where you come from” is significant to talk about now is in terms of how that impacts how you see the world and interact with people and so on. And, in relation to what we’re talking about, also to your practice as well.

So for me—I’m buffing on too much, meandering—for me, I guess where I come from is that I’m a maker. Roy Langmaid—I don’t know if you know the name—Roy Langmaid was one of the qualitative research directs in the UK, still is, God bless him. But, you know, we met each other a number of times, and I did a course with him one time, and through various exercises we’d been doing, he identified me as a sense maker. And that kind of distilled it for me. I thought, “You know what? You’re absolutely right.” And it put a lot of things into place. And essentially, if I think about my journey, I started off making things.

When I was a kid, I used to construct models of stuff. But also I would make stuff from scratch. I’d make stuff from timber, from matchsticks and cardboard boxes, just leftovers, all kinds of things. And I would construct houses and construct Formula One cars and all this kind of thing. I was intrinsically interested in how you can put things together to make something coherent.

I thought, “You know what? You’re absolutely right.” And it put a lot of things into place. And essentially, if I think about my journey, I started off making things. When I was a kid, I used to construct models of stuff. But also I would make stuff from scratch. I’d make stuff from timber, from matchsticks and cardboard boxes, just leftovers, all kinds of things.

I would construct houses and construct Formula One cars and all this kind of thing. I was intrinsically interested in how you can put things together to make something coherent. And I did that passionately as a child, through to when I was about 14.

And then, bizarrely, my best subject at school was design—creative design. And I absolutely loved it. I look back on my schoolbooks now from when I was 13, 14, and I go, “My God, that’s just ridiculous.”

But in my school, you couldn’t do creative design. They constructed the timetable in such a way that you couldn’t do creative design at the same time as doing academic subjects. So because I was academic, I couldn’t pursue design technology or creative design between the ages of 14 and 16.

When I took exams—when you’re 16, we have a tranche of exams that decide whether you stay at school or whatever—I had to do geography and history rather than design and technology. And, you know, it didn’t do me any harm. At the end of the day, I read geography at Oxford, so it kind of worked out fair enough.

But I think what really happened, when I reflect upon it, is I transitioned from making with my hands—physical making—to intellectual making. And in a way, there’s absolutely a parallel. I think the two things absolutely overlap, which is trying to make sense of pieces, of loads and loads of stuff, which you’ve got to put together and make sense of and make shapes of. So as a sense maker, I transitioned from doing that physically with my hands to doing it mentally, intellectually, with my head.

So I think I’m still a maker. But I now make things in my head, because at the end of the day, that is what so much of what we did—and certainly what I do in qualitative research—is all about. You’ve just got this sea of data, and you’ve got to actually try and find the structure.

Where’s the dynamism? Where’s the structure? Where’s the shape? How do we put it all together? How do we make something coherent that makes sense, that other people can then appreciate and understand?

So it’s a sort of intellectual version of what I used to do physically as a child, in a weird kind of way. And interestingly enough, I sort of rediscovered this a year or two ago when I got back to photography, which is something that I’m very, very keen on. I did my first exhibition—it’s not like they’re grand exhibitions, I’m not doing stuff at Tate Britain or anything—but small exhibitions. And I’ve done three now.

One of the brilliant things about when you display your work is you get to talk to people about it. And that’s really fascinating, because when you do something intuitively—as I think people who have a bit of a creative bent do—I never really analyzed it. But when people come and look at your work and they start talking to you about it, you start having to think about it.

Okay, so why does that look like that? Why is it abstract reality? So it’s essentially mostly photographs of architecture, photographs of landscapes, and so on. What I do is I take a picture, and I know that in that picture is something interesting. I don’t quite know what it is, but there’s something more than just what I’m seeing.

Elliott Erwitt, who’s a great American photographer, said words to the effect of: The point of photography is that you see the same thing as everybody else, but you see something different. It’s actually a brilliant term for what we do in qualitative research, as well as what he did in photography.

And I completely identify with that, because what I do is I get it on my computer screen, and I play with it. I recrop it, I move the image around, and so on, until eventually I find—there it is. There’s what I was looking for. I knew it was there somewhere. I’ve now found it—bang. And there it is. So you found the pattern in the data. You found the pattern in the pixels.

So it was then actually as a consequence of that that I wrote a piece for the Association for Qualitative Research over here, which I’m a member of, which actually drew the parallel between my photographic practice and my professional practice in qualitative research. And it occurred to me that maybe I’m not alone. Maybe there are other people, not just in qualitative research, but actually in all kinds of fields of business, who maybe, when you reflect upon it, can see a relationship between a personal passion and what they do for work—assuming they enjoy their work.

So that parallel was really interesting. So at the end of the day, a sense maker. A sense maker of all of that stuff that people tell me in the interviews, you know, and all those pixels that appear when I put it up on the screen. I’m trying to work out what that picture’s about. So I guess that’s where I come from.

Oh, it’s beautiful. I mean, I have so many things that I want to ask about. First, in particular, just to call out the fact that I don’t know how I encountered Roy Langmaid, but I did. And I really became a fan and reached out to him. We had an exchange, actually, I think, over the pandemic.

I’ve invited him here for a conversation, but it just hasn’t worked out. So I’m a massive admirer of Roy. I think, in a way, I was—often I say that I was raised by wolves here in the States and then sort of reached back, I think, through my mentor and other people back to planning and research and then creative development, qualitative. So I have a lot of love for Roy Langmaid and the way that he talks about qualitative. So the idea that he called you a sense maker, I feel the significance of that. That sounds pretty good.

Yeah, no, I mean, I should wear it. I should wear it on my T-shirt. I’m proud of that. He and Wendy Gordon are sort of seminal figures in qualitative research over here. In Wendy’s case, she certainly actually wrote the book. So I was so, so chuffed with that. And it touches on all kinds of—because also he’s a psychologist and I think psychotherapy as well, which is also another part of where I’m from.

Because one of the things that really interested me, coming from that very flat background in the suburbs, was then I went to university and just encountered this other world. I was a state school educated kid, right? And I went to Oxford and in those days, 70% of the intake there was from private schools. So their parents had paid for them to be educated. A lot of them had been to boarding school. And I was just from a state day school in South London. I was the only one from my school to go to Oxford.

So all of a sudden you’re there, you’re surrounded by all these people who come from a completely different background to you. That was extraordinary. I think that’s another aspect of it: difference, encountering difference. So coming from that very homogeneous background, encountering difference and going, “My God, actually my background isn’t everybody’s background. My life isn’t everybody’s background.”

And then you compound that by going with your friends to their home for the weekends—you find yourself having dinner with their parents. And all of a sudden, the reason why you thought, “Why is Mike like that? Why does he do that?” Or, “Harry, why is he such a pain?” And then you see them with their parents and it all falls into place.

And that, again, was a really, really subtle experience. So not only appreciating difference—because I think I’ve always had a curious mind, and that sort of dovetails with the whole sense maker thing—but then to actually see how different people’s backgrounds impact them as adults as well, and how varied and diverse people can be in those terms, was great.

And that, I think, again, is something I just kind of carried forward into my practice—just a real curiosity. Again, it’s sensemaking. Why? Why are they like that? Why do they feel that? Why are they responding to this idea in the way that they responded? Why do they feel about the brand in that way? All of these things kind of dovetail and all overlap and it all kind of makes sense together, I think.

Again, it’s sensemaking. Why? Why are they like that? Why do they feel that? Why are they responding to this idea in the way that they responded? Why do they feel about the brand in that way? All of these things kind of dovetail and all overlap and it all kind of makes sense together, I think.

Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be? You’ve talked about it a little bit, but as a boy, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be an architect. Somebody gave me—one of my family, I don’t know, they must’ve seen something—they gave me a book, I think called Modern Buildings, as simple as that, when I was about 14. And it featured the work of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, several wonderful modern architects.

And so when I look back at my sketchbooks now, I can see I was drawing extraordinary sort of three-dimensional house designs and stuff like that, which is just completely ridiculous. I wanted to be an architect, but again, I was taken away from that because—even though it wasn’t working with your hands—it was still drawing.

You don’t really draw. You want to be a lawyer, you want to be an accountant, you want to be a medic. I came from a very aspiring, low middle-class family. So, basically, architects—they draw, don’t they? You don’t want to do that. You want to get a proper professional job.

In retrospect, of course, I would have realized that architecture is a pretty professional job—you know, a mere seven years’ training. It’s pretty credible. But that was a dream that was eventually realized, because about five or six years ago, we eventually did manage to get ourselves—we designed, with an architect—a low energy house in the UK, which we moved into. So that was it. Finally got there, through a very sort of contorted route, finally got to that destination.

So yeah, that’s what I wanted to do. Again, it all feeds into the same thing. It’s about creating stuff from pieces and creating something that is coherent and makes sense.

So catch us up. Tell me—where are you now, and what do you do for work? How do you talk about what you do?

Okay. So I started out in advertising. I worked in advertising agencies for the first six years. First three years were at Leo Burnett, as a matter of fact, in London. Then I worked at one of the hot creative agencies that grew up at the same time as BBH—BBH is still around, but GGT, where I was, isn’t.

Dave Trott was a really seminal figure in my experience, and we might touch on that later on. But after about six years, the bit that really interested me was what people did with ideas. So I was the guy—I was an account handler, you know, a bag carrier for my sins. I was the guy who had to go and sit behind the glass with the clients and watch the groups.

And when Rob, 10 minutes or half an hour into group seven, started slagging off the creative idea he was being presented with, I was like, “Well, you know, I think what Rob actually means is...”—busy trying to calm the client down and sell the idea. Because Dave Trott’s thing was always, “Don’t come back to the office if you haven’t sold the creative work.” That’s what he said to the account handlers.

So anyway, that was the bit that really interested me. I stepped out after six years because that was the thing that interested me, and went straight into research. Within three years, I was running my own business in partnership with someone.

We did that for 10 years. Then I stepped away from that partnership, set up my own business—there were about seven or eight of us. About six years ago, I went freelance. And it’s been fantastic.

I mean, of course, it’s a roller coaster ride. But generally speaking, absolutely wonderful, wonderful work, fabulous clients. You get the clients you deserve. And therefore, I’m very, very glad that I deserve those clients, because my relationships with my clients are so, so good.

Essentially, my work broadly splits into two. I do brand development and creative development. A lot of my work is ad development, though I’m increasingly stepping back from calling it ad development, since advertising is rapidly becoming the “A word.”

I think the emphasis is on creative elements. And genuinely, I do creative development. It’s not just advertising—it is developing creative ideas, but also packaging design, pack graphics. Recently I did some work for a dog food business on pack graphics, also corporate identity—logos, if you like—and I’ve done some of that work for major businesses.

So there’s that creative development side, which is about half of it. And then the other half is strategy development—principally, positioning development. And of course, the two are incredibly closely linked, needless to say.

Quite often, it’ll be a project where I’ll do the strategy development and then we’ll move on to the creative development as well. In some cases, like this big international project I did last year, it was a two-stage project. It was a positioning exercise for an international schools network, as a matter of fact, who’ve got offices in America, Mexico, Spain, India, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia.

They had a guy who became their marketing director who had worked as a marketing director at Diageo. So he knew his onions. He got me involved via the non-exec there, who I’ve known for a very long time from working on Coca-Cola. We did a positioning project internationally there, and then coming out of that we did the brand identity development. It had a huge impact on them. It’s been incredibly positive.

So there’s an absolute process. If you’re going to do good creative development work, you need to get strategy. But equally, if you’re going to do good strategy work, you need to understand creative as well—because you need to understand how that can manifest and inspire great ideas.

Because there are all kinds of really pedestrian brand propositions and brand strategy. Some of the stuff I see from some of the briefs—I say, “Oh my God, really? It’s just embarrassing.”

Can you say more about that? About the relationship, the necessity that these things work together in that way?

That’s really—it’s probably more obvious if you’re doing creative development that you need to understand strategy. One of the things I always say when I’m doing creative development—I work very closely with agencies. Unusually, because of my advertising agency background, they tend to trust me.

Because, of course, research is notorious for, you know, “kill your creative baby at birth,” and creatives classically hate it. So I make a point of trying to engage the creative team in the research process: talk about the idea, ensure they’re there at the debrief, and so on.

I really understand the creative idea. But another part of that is also saying: tell me about the strategy. What’s the strategic basis of this? Not just the marketing context, but how have you arrived at the proposition? Did you explore other areas? Why do you think this idea is going to have cut-through?

Then what I always do is find a way—even towards the end of my focus groups, for example—to put the strategy in front of the consumer. Obviously not as an advertising agency strategy statement, but just as, “Funny enough, I was talking to the people who came up with this idea, and they told me what their intention is behind it. Because what they feel is that people feel so-and-so... So what they’re trying to do is...”

Then I ask, “How do you feel about that?” And they tell me how they feel. Then I say, “Okay, how does that sort of fit with the advertising we’ve been talking about?”

So what you’re doing is you’re doing a sense check against this stake in the ground—this is what this thing is supposed to be doing. One of the things that helps you do is work out if you’ve got issues with the idea, and on what level those issues exist. Is it the strategic foundation that’s flawed? Is it that the creative idea doesn’t deliver the strategy effectively? Or is it just executional?

That’s a really critical thing in creative development research: to be able to identify at what level the issues arise, so you can actually, with your diagnostics, say, “Okay, this is what you need to address going forward.”

Flipping it the other way, I’ve done lots of strategy development work. And you can arrive at a strategy that’s really pedestrian, that inspires nobody. Or you can come to a place that comes at it from an angle. What I’m really into, with both creative work and strategy work, is coming at it laterally—from the unexpected place—so that people go, “Oh, okay.”

One of the things I’ve always said is that strategy should be something that I should be able to sit with my mate in the pub—or you should be able to go have a coffee with a friend—and when they say, “Oh, all right, what’d you get that for?” you can answer them.

Human beings position things with each other all the time. In almost every interaction we have, we naturally position things without realizing it. And what you need is a position for your brand that you can say, and it doesn’t sound like it’s from Planet Marketing—it sounds like a genuine thing.

You need to approach strategy and brand propositions, for me, as laterally as you do creative ideas. Because at the end of the day, yes, insight can be very powerful. You can find that insight and turn it your particular way, but you’ve got to find an angle on it. Because a lot of stuff is the same—you’ve got to be imaginative about strategy in the same way as you are about creative.

Sorry, I’m buffing on too much about that. But I think that’s why, when you’re doing strategy development stuff, I’m just trying to push the envelope as much as possible. In fact, I’ll often do idea generation sessions with clients as well. So I won’t just do the strategy development research—I’ll actually help develop propositions too.

All the time, I’m looking to develop stuff that’s a little bit edgy, that’s going to push the edges of things, to put into the research. Because it’s a bit of a case of: rubbish in, rubbish out. You’ve got to have some really good, stimulating stuff to take into the research.

What do you love about it? Where’s the joy in it?

Oh my God. Well, fortunately, I do love the work. I mean, I’ve been doing it for a very long time. And I really, really do love the work. I love working with creative people. I love creative ideas. I love all that stuff. But I think what I really love about it—what the real joy for me is—is talking to real people.

It’s so easy in the world of advertising. We used to produce our ads in Soho, in the West End of London—an ivory tower. And then I’m off in some suburb in Birmingham, sitting in somebody’s front room, listening to people talk about it. It’s a different world. You’ve got to get out of your bubble.

I actually regard it as a massive privilege to talk to ordinary people day in and day out, week after week. In my peer group, that’s pretty unusual. I’m the awkward bugger who, at a dinner party, when people start going, “Well, you know, people nowadays do blah, blah, blah,” I go, “Well, actually, I’m not entirely sure that’s right, because I’ve talked to people. And it’s not quite like that.”

Most people go, “Whoa,” because most people don’t talk to ordinary people most of the time. Maybe they do their cleaning or drop their kids off at the babysitter, but they don’t actually listen. And it’s a real privilege, because it just takes the scales from your eyes. You can’t live in the bubble anymore. You can’t live in the echo chamber, because you know how real people live.

And for me—as a privileged, middle-class, middle-aged male—I’m very aware of my privilege, to actually get out there all the time and talk to ordinary people. That’s a privilege. And of course, the way the world is heading, people are getting more and more separated, and less and less aware of the reality of other people’s lives. So it’s incredibly important.

I’m very, very grateful for it. And I’ve learned an awful lot. Because one of the interesting things, you know, when you’re doing stuff—on baked beans, or on organic food, or Diet Coke—you’re incidentally learning stuff about people’s lives and lifestyles and values that is absolutely fascinating.

So I think that’s what I love about it. I carry that with me. And yeah, I’m the guy who really annoys your guests at your dinner party.

Well, you know, I think we share that. I think you’ve probably put in many more hours than I have, but I’m very aware of the fact that I’ve spent more time than the average person in conversation with everyday people, and how unique a point of view that is. And how different. I feel very grateful. I mean, I walked into a brand consultancy because I loved TV, and they put me in front of people and told me to ask them questions. And it made me a different kind of person just by virtue of having to do that kind of conversation with people. Unbelievably, I really feel grateful for that. And I love that you’re calling attention to it. How do you feel about it? Can you tell me more about what it’s done to you, to be a person who’s listened and asked as much?

That’s a really good question. The danger is, I have to try to avoid being too angry. Not angry with the people I talk to, but angry with how people talk about the people I talk to.

I’ll give you an example. You doubtless know Brexit—when we voted to come out of the European Union in 2016. Absolute catastrophic mistake. Something that will be the biggest act of self-harm in national history. I’ve heard it called—100% correct—complete lunacy. We shan’t get into the reasons why it took place. That’s a whole other discussion.

But I’ll give you an example. I was actually training—doing my psychotherapy training, as a matter of fact—and I was going into London for one of my sessions. It was the day after the results had come in. Me and loads of people, of course, were just reeling from this horror that we were going to be exiting Europe.

I could hear, just along the train carriage, somebody talking about it. Quite a posh guy. He was really angry about it. And I heard him say, “The thing is, these people shouldn’t be given the vote.”

I thought to myself: do you know what? The reason they voted as they did is because of people like you—who have the arrogance and the ignorance to imagine these people are stupid and shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Actually, if you spend time with them, you realize they’re not. Very early on, one of the early projects I worked on was with a very mass market group of consumers. One of the things I noticed in the groups was how they struggled to articulate their feelings about things.

This guy on the train would have thought, “See how stupid they are.” They’re not stupid, mate. The fact that they don’t have the language or the confidence to express their feelings, or maybe the verbal skills to articulate how they feel, doesn’t make them stupid.

Unless you have that attitude, you’re only going to do more to push them away. It’s that terrible mistake Hillary Clinton made, when she referred to the “stupid people”—and she deservedly got absolutely clattered for that. It’s that ridiculous attitude that alienates people.

That, for me, was one of the very earliest lightbulb moments. You work with that, and you give people different ways to express themselves. But also, just don’t make them feel inadequate for being unable to articulate. You help them find the words.

You say, “I wonder if maybe it’s a little like this?” You help them find the language. People can be so patronizing.

I remember sitting behind the glass with clients back in the day as well, hearing the way they would talk about the people who paid their bloody salaries and their bloody mortgages. I’m sorry—so long. Yeah, so long.

So as you can tell, I get a bit—I get quite angry about it. That arrogance, that distance from the reality of ordinary people’s lives. I suppose that’s the bigger picture of what it’s done to me.

Well, I mean, it’s beautiful. And I ask because I feel the same way. I mean, we assume responsibility—I assume responsibility—for the people that I talk to. It’s a real obligation and a commitment to represent them. And because I think there’s this—I want to transition into talking about….the word “method” is coming to mind. How do you do what you do? I think often qualitative interviewing, moderating, that stuff can be sort of invisible. It just looks like, “Oh, Graham’s an affable guy. He’s really good with those people, and he gets them to say interesting things.” But there’s a lot of skill. There’s a lot of craft at work. I wonder if you might talk a little bit—just executionally, operationally—how do you do what you do? What does it mean to have a conversation? What does it mean to listen and ask questions about creative and about people’s everyday lives?

That’s a really good question. Just to illustrate that there’s so much more to it than meets the eye, I’ll tell you a little story.

About 10 years ago, somebody I worked with in London went back to Dublin, and she got me over to run a two-day training course in qualitative research with the planning departments of her agency. So I did this thing for two days. At the end of it, I remember one of the planners came up to me and said, “My God, I never realized there was so much to it.”

And thereafter, I got almost all of the qualitative research projects that agency did, because they had no idea of the intricacy of what was involved. I see this all the time.

One of the things I’m obsessed about is stimulus material—getting stimulus material right. In both creative and strategy development, you’re often given these concept boards with massively overwritten propositions—strategy statements consisting of several sentences, often incorporating three or four different ideas. They’re surrounded by stock photos—women cartwheeling on beaches and so on.

You show this to people and say, “How do you feel about the brand being talked about in this way?” And where do they begin? The language is opaque, it’s marketing language, and there are multiple ideas there. Which pictures are they responding to?

So I developed this concept called invisible stimulus. The idea is: don’t use any stimulus.

How do you put the idea in front of people? You talk about it as something you just noticed or heard. Like a chat down the pub: “So there I was at this company the other day, and they make this vodka. They put sloes in it. And they were telling me that apparently all the sloes are handpicked. What do you make of that?”

And we have a chat about it. The first time I did that—using that very example—one of the participants said at the end, “Thanks, that was really good fun. I thought it was going to be boring marketing, but that was a really interesting conversation.”

During that conversation, I put eight different positioning concepts in front of them.

So I thought, okay, I’m onto something here. That’s a pretty extreme version. But what I often do in positioning research is turn the positionings into quotes from users of the brand.

So rather than marketing artifacts trying to sell you something, it’s: “I’ve talked to people who use Brand X, and here are a few of the things they’ve said they like about it. I wonder if any of these connect with you?”

Now you’re dealing with other human beings—not with a brand, but with how people feel about something. So stimulus is really important. I work really hard with clients on developing it.

Similarly, in creative work, it’s all about identifying the right kind of stimulus for that idea. If you’re looking at advertising—say, three ideas in a project—it’s completely legitimate to use three different types of stimulus.

Typically, less is more. In many cases, a vividly written narrative that lets people picture it in their own mind works better. Storyboards are the death of me—people get hung up on the staccato, static nature of them.

Nowadays, you get AI imagery. Clients like the closer it gets to final execution, the better. But that’s not true. Because the final execution won’t look like that. It never does.

What we need to be looking at is the idea—the ability of the idea to connect in a relevant and distinctive way, and convey the understanding we want people to take away about the brand. So it’s about the idea.

They’ll say, “But you’re not comparing like with like. You’re using storyboards for that one, video for another, and a narrative for the third.”

We’re not creating a level playing field for the stimulus—we’re creating a level playing field for the idea. And we use whatever stimulus best conveys the idea. I’m really obsessed with that—getting the stimulus right, whether strategic or creative.

How you structure discussion is absolutely critical, too. Some people still start creative groups by saying, “What advertising do you like? What are your favorite ads?” You’ve screwed it from the start. You frame the whole thing. The group coalesces around some definition of “good advertising,” and if what you show doesn’t fit, it’s already in trouble.

So never do that. And then there are all kinds of things about asking open questions, how you pursue a response, and so on.

But obviously a critical part—and this is becoming more mission-critical with AI moving into our arena—is analysis. I’ve always called it the black box of qualitative research. It’s where the magic happens.

What we don’t do is reportage. It’s all about interpretation—finding patterns in the data. We’re not probability aggregators. What often matters is that thing Robert said in group four that unlocked the whole project.

So what? Why did he say that? What was he responding to? Why didn’t others say that? You develop hypotheses and test them against all the data. Constant cross-referencing.

I’ve always described analysis as peeling the layers off an onion. You can’t get to the one beneath until you remove the one on top.

Incidentally, one of the good things to come out of COVID is that most of our work is now on Zoom rather than face to face. God knows I love face to face—and I still do it, it’s stimulating—but I’d say we get 99% of the results online.

One of the things that’s changed is that now clients watch almost all my groups. And what’s happened is they can now see the difference analysis makes. They’ve heard people talk. They go, “Okay, it’s like that.”

Then next week, Graham comes back and does a debrief. And they go, “Wow. I hadn’t seen that coming.” Because what I’ve done is dug away and found the underlying patterns, motivations, implications for development. I’ve made sense of it. I’m a sense maker.

I’ve shown them what the future could look like—something they never would’ve got to. Before, when they saw a couple of groups in a viewing studio out of, say, eight, they’d think, “Okay, maybe those two were anomalous.”

Now, they’ve seen all eight. And still, when I come back, they say, “Wow.” Because they still wouldn’t have gotten what I present.

I think it’s added massive value. That black box—they can now see that’s where the magic takes place. But we’re also massively under threat, because the budget holders don’t get to see that.

And they’re saying, “Hey, we can get that done faster and cheaper.” Well, great—if you want to commoditize your insight so your brand loses competitive advantage over the next five years. Off you go, mate. But boy, that’s short-sighted.

Yeah. I always like getting sort of foundational in a way about qualitative—and maybe this is what you’re talking about with the black box. What is it—and you’ve been at it for a while—how would you say qualitative has changed? And what is the proper role and the real value of qualitative? Because I hear in the stories you’re telling—and I’ve had these experiences too—where there’s a set of quantitative expectations that clients often bring into qualitative. So how do you articulate the value and purpose of qualitative, especially as we do enter this weird synthetic age?

I think that’s a really good question. In terms of its results, I think it’s very justifiable on an ROI basis. You look at the amount you spend on proper, human-led qual—the return you can get on that is absolutely huge. Three campaigns I worked on last year won Effie’s Effectiveness Awards.

Without bigging myself up too much, none of them would have turned out the way they did without the qualitative research. It helped them identify the most promising route, how to best optimize it, and—in one case—it enabled the client to buy a route they felt very uncomfortable with.

The agency managed to persuade the client to include it as one of three routes. The client said, “Okay, well, I’ve got two I really like, so we’ll put that one in too.” And the route the agency had to really push for just absolutely nailed it. It made a huge difference.

So I can cite the effectiveness of that. At one level, you can get a fantastic return on investment. You can persuade the C-suite to buy stuff they wouldn’t normally buy—if you can get it in front of the consumer.

You can simply optimize ideas. Maybe you’ve got an idea, but there’s something going on that you can improve: “If you address that in this way...”

Another thing I like to think about is that ideally, what you deliver doesn’t just apply to this creative route or brand positioning. It’s a framework. It gives people a way of thinking about other creative work they do—other brands within the portfolio.

Because the insight you provide into human motivation and how people actually process communications—you really hope that builds a store of understanding that they’ll bring to their next campaign, or when they move on to another brand and work on repositioning.

So my hope is that you’re giving people a broader framework of understanding—a wider set of reference points—that they can bring to bear on future projects, not just the one you worked on.

And I think it’s incredibly important for us in our field now to really lobby and fight for the difference it makes. There’s a lot of pressure in the industry at the moment. And it’s incredibly short-sighted. We’ve got to keep reminding people of the value of what we do.

Can you tell me a little bit more about one of those stories? They sound amazing—to the degree you’re comfortable.

Yeah, well, I’ve written them up—you can read them. But the particular example I’m thinking of that pushed the envelope a little bit was in Ireland. There’s an Irish insurance business called FBD. The “F” stands for farmers—it originally did farmers’ insurance. But they’ve moved into household and car insurance and so on.

They were suffering from a salience issue. So much of choosing financial services products is about salience—especially insurance. You need mental availability, trust, etc. They wanted to make it clear that FBD stood for support—that they’d be there for you in the event of a problem.

Now, that’s arguably a bit generic. But they’re very embedded in Irish society, and they wanted to get that across. So the agency produced several routes intended to build that sense: this is an insurance company you should consider because they’ll be there for you, and they’re Irish—they’re embedded in the community.

The agency developed three routes. One of them the client was really unsure about, because it didn’t do the “embedded in Irish society” bit. What it did was create theoretical meanings for the acronym FBD: “Fuchsia Bike Dads,” “Field of Butterfly Detectives,” and so on.

Each was presented like: “FBD stands for Fuchsia Bike Dads”—three men in lycra, on pink bikes. Then, “Or does it stand for this?” Or this? And finally: “What it really stands for is support.”

So you draw people in with something completely unexpected and memorable. And you’ll talk about it. All those things Dave Trott used to talk about when I was working at GGT 30 years ago—he was well ahead of his time. In the world of social media, talkability and shareability are absolutely critical now too.

And it just really cut through. The really important thing was giving people a reason to remember FBD when they’re thinking, “My insurance is up for renewal—let’s have a look at FBD.”

You’ve built that mental availability. It’s just there when you need to access it, which is how memory works. And it had a fantastic impact—measurable, in terms of market share, inquiries, etc. I can’t remember all the numbers, but it’s in the piece I wrote on LinkedIn.

That research gave the client the confidence to buy a route they were uncomfortable with. It looks like no other insurance advertising out there. None of the worthiness. Just great fun—and it did the job.

And also—it performed that same purpose of coming in at an angle, right?

Yeah, a lateral angle. Completely. And the way I did that one—if I recall—I used a narrative script. I didn’t show them images of Fuchsia Bike Dads or Butterfly Detectives. I just said, “We see three men standing by their bicycles in pink lycra…” and so on.

So it’s just Graham telling a story to a group of people, right?

Well, you know, it is. And that’s something that clients sometimes feel a little uncomfortable with. Sometimes, if it’s a particular style of voiceover, we’ll get it pre-recorded. But I’ve done a lot of acting in my time, so I’m able to deliver things reasonably well.

To give you an example of how well narrative scripts can work—there’s the insurance brand Aviva. I developed a campaign with them some years ago that ran for many years. It used a guy who’s a big comedy actor over here. He became their sort of signature: whenever you saw him in one of their ads, you knew it was Aviva. Though he always played different characters, just like he did on TV.

They always had a comic element. Then they came to do a life insurance ad, and they weren’t sure if they should use this comic actor. Because life insurance is a bit… you know. But one of the three routes we put in—two were more conventional, but one used him, not in a comic role, playing it straight.

He’s in the house, the family’s packing to go on holiday. He’s handing them things, staying out of the way. Then he’s standing on the stairs, just above the hallway. The daughter says to the mother, “It won’t be the same without Dad this year.” And she says, “I know.”

I’m filling up even telling you—and she gives him a hug. Then we cut back to him.

It was inspired by a movie—I can’t remember which one—but basically, he’s dead. And he’s looking down on his family. I delivered that as a narrative. I had people in tears in the group.

Not because of my delivery—but because the narrative script was written really carefully. Usually, the agency gives me something the creatives wrote. I edit it. I take out technical directions like “clock wipe to...” and anything like “at this point we realize the brand is good for…”

You have to let people take it for themselves. So I help them write it. But it shows the power—the emotional power—of something that’s really well written. It’s a story. And it was extraordinary. That convinced the client to go with the route they were least comfortable with.

I love it. I love these stories because they shine a light. Well, I guess I want to finish with the time we have. I have to ask about mentors. If you have mentors or touchstones—you’ve already mentioned Roy. I’d love to hear more. Dave Trott is someone I’m aware of—I’ve watched some of his stuff on YouTube. Maybe talk a little about Roy Langmaid and Dave Trott. What you learned from them?

Yeah. Roy reinforced my—well, I was fantastically lucky. The first guy I worked with when I moved from advertising into research was John Siddall. I don’t think he’s still with us, unfortunately. But he ran a business called Reflections.

He just nailed it. He did everything right. Stimulus, structure, open questions, not framing—it was superb. I learned the basics from the right man. It was a fantastic place to start.

Subsequently, when I employed people, I found myself having to “de-train” them. They hadn’t learned in the right place. They weren’t doing it right.

Eventually, I started taking on graduate trainees so I could train them from scratch. Now, that might sound egotistical—like I’m threatened by difference. But I’d like to think it’s because I wanted people to do it the right way.

John was fantastic. Dave Trott—oh my God. To be honest, in my first two or three years at Leo Burnett, I didn’t learn a great deal about advertising. I learned about advertising agencies.

I learned about advertising when I went to GGT. They produced great work. Dave had no patience with me at all—I was one of those poncy, Oxford-educated bag carriers. He used to say, “Don’t come back to the office if you haven’t sold the work.”

So I had very little patience from him. But, God, did he know what he was doing. Single-mindedness—that’s what I learned.

He’d say—and I’m sure he got this from somewhere—“Graham, when are you more likely to catch a tennis ball? When I chuck you a dozen tennis balls or one?” Point made.

So single-mindedness. Which applies strategically and creatively. And then: impact. The importance of impact. It doesn’t matter how clever your advertising is if it doesn’t get noticed. If it doesn’t stop people and make them pay attention.

That was number one for him—create impact. It was a really seminal experience. I learned a huge amount. To be able to step out, after working two or three years with Dave, into research—that so informed the way I approach things.

So yeah, probably John Siddall and Dave Trott were key figures. I would’ve loved to spend more time with Roy, but I never worked with him. It was just one or two encounters at training events that really informed things.

One other thought—not quite a mentor, but a seminal experience—was sitting in debriefs when I was an account handler. You’d get the debrief from the researcher, get to the end, and think, “Brilliant. So what the devil do we do now?”

They told you all the problems and gave no solutions.

I was determined that when I went into research, I’d never do that. You will never come away from my debrief without a sense of the way forward. My company tagline is: Clarity. Direction. Progress.

You give people incredible clarity—so they understand what’s happened. You give them direction—so they know which way to go. So they can make progress.

That was absolutely a reaction to not getting that from so many debriefs I experienced in advertising. And that’s the reason creators hate research. Because there’s so much bad research out there. That’s the brutal truth.

Beautiful. Graham, I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It’s been a real treat talking with you. Thank you very much.

I’m sorry to have gone on and on and on, but it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for asking.

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