Sam Peskin on Questions & Others

Sam Peskin is the co-founder of the creative research studio Early Studies. Previously, he was founder at Speedboat Partners and a strategy consultant at Highsnobiety. The first I heard of Sam was when they released #Census27, their first Data Drop, which uses Social Circle Surveying (SCS), a method invented by political scientist Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij that asks people not about what they think, but about what other people think. Using this method, the inventor of Social Circle Surveying, , correctly predicted the outcomes of each of the major elections in the past decade.

Sam, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.

It's my pleasure. It's great to be here.

As you might know, I start all of these conversations with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who lives here in Hudson. She's an oral historian and she helps people tell their story. I always over explain it because it's such a big question. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

It's a great question. It's a great opener. It's a funny one, because it's something that I get asked a lot, actually, in London, because my accent is kind of weird. And I kind of drawl a little bit and some people think I'm Australian or American. I've been asked it a lot in every English speaking place where I go.

But there are a lot of ways to answer. I guess the way of answering it that's most true to me is that I grew up Jewish in South London. And if you ask anyone who's Jewish in London what's significant about growing up Jewish in South London, they would tell you that there aren't any Jews in South London. Because the most Jews who live in London are in the north.

And so I was a rare breed. But the interesting thing about it, from my experience, I guess, is that I think my grandmother emigrated to the UK from Latvia, during the Second World War. She met my grandfather who had a hat store in East London. And my other grandparents were immigrants from the previous generation. But I tie my identity quite a lot to that experience of being Jewish, but being not just a small minority, but a tiny, tiny minority and always feeling a little bit an outsider.

And I think I spent most of my childhood trying to figure out what that meant. And trying to, I think in the end, I came to see having an outsider mentality or feeling like an outsider, looking in as a big advantage. And so I think it's something that I've probably carried through my life and my career, this kind of outsider mentality. It's definitely what drew me and my co-founder, Alfred together. About 15 years ago, when we first met, he's similar, comes from a very, very small town in Sweden. And always felt felt like an outsider. I think it's what really drew us together in the first place.

Can you tell me a story about, I mean, maybe discovering that you were an outsider in South London? Or what was it like? How did that show up to be a tiny minority?

Well, I think the first thing is, it's kind of something that I guess happens to you from other people's impressions of you and that I don't look English. I don't look like an Anglo Saxon English person. And I don't sound it.

So often people would ask me the same question, "Where are you from?" And I'd say, "I'm from London." And they would go, "Where are you from originally?"

And the interesting thing, certainly about my family history is that I know some of it, but a lot of it I don't really know. It's kind of Polish, Russian, a bit of Eastern European influence. But I can't trace my family history back from a certain place.

And I think that certainly in my experience, it's something that you kind of, being Jewish, you have to figure out what it means to you. And it's something that growing up, eventually, I think, I feel lucky that I made friends around me. I didn't grow up knowing a lot of other Jewish people, but I made friends who had a very positive influence on me and in the way that I kind of discovered what that meant for me.

I'm so sensitive to that question, "Where do you come from?" It's a close sibling to "Where are you from?" How did you experience that question in the past? What was it like?

I think, good question. I think sometimes when it's asked by someone, it depends who it's coming from, but I think certainly I used to feel that there was an implication that you didn't look like you belonged. But I think it's a great question as an intro to how do you think and how have you ended up here? The question that I ask myself a lot.

Do you have recollections of what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did young Sam want to be when he grew up?

I think when I was really young, I wanted to be a footballer. I've always been obsessed with football. And then I was decent academically at school, but I really wanted to be an actor or a writer. I used to do a lot of acting at school and university. And then my parents wanted me to be a lawyer, which I was, or they thought that I should try being a lawyer, which I did try and failed miserably. I was not good at the law. I mean, I've always been a bit of a lateral thinker. I try and I've always tried to find more creative ways of solving problems.

And so I did law after university. I had a contract with a law firm. I was all ready to go. But again, I really didn't feel I was similar to the other people who were doing it. And in the end I didn't enjoy it, and I wasn't good. So I stopped doing that. And I went into advertising, digital advertising when I was 22, 23, when the idea of digital advertising was very much a thing. And being in the "creative industries," I felt a lot more comfortable. It felt the right kind of thinking for me and the right kind of people.

And so I worked at a couple of ad agencies at Brandside and doing digital and social and stuff. And eventually I landed at Vice in London in about 2014. And that was kind of the biggest unlock for me, I guess. It was when I really started to understand who I was and myself and what I was good at and what I wanted to do.

So I don't think I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I think I've come to treat work as paid education in the sense that you get to learn all the time about yourself, about your relationship with the world of work and the world of business and the types of people that you get along with and the types of thinking that resonates with you. And so that's kind of always how I've treated it.

It's such a phenomenon. What was it like, what was your experience like there and how did it sort of change you or impact you?

I arrived in 2013, 2014 at a time when it was just starting to jump off. And I remember coming in and just being, I remember picking up the Vice magazine the first time I saw it. And I was thinking, what is this? And I kind of had a feeling that I wanted in at that point.

What were you responding to, do you think?

It was just the irreverence of it, I guess, the language. And it was kind of anarchic and filthy in a certain way. And it just felt completely different, but super fresh. And I remember sitting in the lobby of Vice in London and really not knowing where I was or what was about to happen. I didn't really know how this business made money or what it did or what kind of people would be inside the walls.

When I eventually got there, I mean, I spent four years there at a time that was incredibly exciting. And talking about feeling like an outsider, I mean, at Vice, I was in a place where everyone felt that way. And it was anarchic and people there were incredibly talented, very ambitious, very smart. But I guess for me, the thing that was really explosive was that there weren't any barriers to you having an idea and getting it made. You could really do anything.

And I guess I was 27 when I arrived there. So the timing was good for me. I was super hungry. And I ended up surrounded with a lot of people who felt similarly to the way they wanted to change something in the world. And we were in the best place for it. And it was a place where if you had ambition and you were hungry and you wanted to really push, you could end up in a lot of rooms that you never thought that you would end up in. And it really was a huge unlock for me. I still have a lot of very close friends who I worked with there and mentors. I just came from lunch with the guy who was CEO in London when I was there. We're still all in touch. Amazing place. It was incredible for me for sure.

And where are you now? Tell me a little bit about where you are now, what you're doing now, what you're working on.

So I now have a creative research studio called Early Studies, which I founded with a longtime friend of mine called Alfred Malmos. We call ourselves a creative research studio because we were both career strategists. Alfred spent 10 years at Google. I was four years at Vice and we both spent time at agencies. And we kind of came to the realization that research should be the most intellectually inspiring and fascinating part of marketing. And often it didn't feel that way.

It was a hunch. And it's something that, I mean, research is something that every business needs. But certainly in our experience, we felt there could be more creativity involved in coming to the answers that you need to solve business problems.

And so we started to thrash out a new way of doing things based on new methodologies, but based fundamentally on an idea that the answer is better questions, which is a thing that we say a lot. Finding more creative ways to get under the skin of a problem and figure out what's really happening by focusing on the why rather than the what all the time.

I think I discovered you through Ed Cotton. I think he shared your, I'm spacing on what you called it though, the drop.

The data drop, the census 27.

And that was not that long ago. So I guess my question is, I want to hear more about the methodology because I'm fascinated by it, but then also your experience of launching, because you're very new as far as I understand. And I'm curious what the reaction has been.

We're very new. We're about a year and a half old and we really started with the idea or the hypothesis that I talked to you about, and we stitched together a methodology that fundamentally is borrowed from political science. So we were trying to find a way to access deeper insights, hidden truths around people and why they make the decisions they do. What really is the intellectual makeup of people and how do we do that at scale?

We came across a methodology that was created by a guy who's now a board member to us, a guy called Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij. And the methodology is called Social Circle Surveying. And we discovered this through a conversation with Kristoffer, which was kind of beautiful. We asked him how much he knew about research. He's a professor of philosophy and an academic, and he knew a lot about research, a lot that we didn't know.

And he said to us, "The funny thing about research, I just don't understand why we ask people what they think. No one knows what they think. And if they do, they're often reluctant to tell a stranger when you're asking deep questions. Instead of asking people what they think, we should ask people what they think other people think." And we kind of sat there and went, "Hmm, okay, that's kind of interesting."

And the reality is that Kristoffer had been testing this in political polling for the past 10 years. And the basis of it is, if you think about in a political setting, if you were to ask instead of calling someone up or knocking on their door and saying, "Are you going to vote red or blue?" You might ask them what proportion of your street do you believe are going to vote Republican?

Now, the reality is that we massively overestimate what we know about ourselves, and we massively underestimate what we know about other people. There is a huge hidden well of knowledge based in our instinctive judgments of people or in our understanding of their views or opinions from conversations or from social media.

But the real thing is that when you ask someone what they think, you're asking someone and their ego is in the room. And so people tend to manage that or they project and they give you an answer that they might hope to be true about themselves or that gives the best representation of them.

And social circle surveying is a way of bypassing that egocentrism. And instead, when you ask people about others, and they reflect on all of their knowledge and understanding about their peer group or their friends or their family, you get to very deep and profound answers about people. And within those questions, people tend to be very expansive talking about other people because we're giving them a safe space to gossip effectively, and human beings are hard-wired to do that.

Eventually, within that answer, people will tell you what they really think. But it's a much safer space to reveal your opinion when you're speaking about people in general or speaking about other people specifically.

Yeah. And tell me a little bit about the drop. The census is amazing. It's an amazing thing. How did you go about developing it? Choosing the kinds of questions? Tell me a little bit about that.

So we've been going for about a year and a half. We have a great base of clients who are partners that have come mostly from our network. But we wanted to get out there. We wanted to release something. And we wanted to do it in an interesting and innovative way. And we thought about that for a long time. We were really exhaustive in what that could be.

I think the fundamental thing was that we didn't want to be a research company that publishes hot takes on what's going to happen or what has happened. We wanted to remove as much subjectivity from our perspective as possible. And we talk about that as kind of being the marble in Rome. We want to create data that other people can base opinions on, that we can arm other people with data sets that are interestingly created and interestingly produced, but effectively to give people the ammunition and the raw materials, especially people who are experts in their fields, which we are generalists, I would say. And we try and approach research from as naive a position as possible, really knowing nothing from the outset.

And the data drop came from this idea that we wanted to release a huge, almost quite overwhelming amount of data using a methodology that we developed called Five Now Three, or X Now X, because we sometimes change those numbers. But the first iterations we did were Five Now Three. And the basis of that is that we, using social circle surveying, so asking people about their friendship group or asking about others in general, we ask a question about their attitude today.

We then ask the same question, but asking about their attitude five years ago. And then we ask them about how they project that attitude might be in three years' time. And what it allows us to do is effectively to draw an eight-year trend line on a whole bunch of different issues on where current attitudes have come from, how they're shifting, and where they might be moving.

And with Census 27, we wanted to do this on a really big scale and just release it. And so we did it across six broad lifestyle themes, ranging from politics to consumption to health to work, et cetera. And the way this is a quant methodology, we think of it as HauteQuant, quants that we're coming from with a point of view or something exciting, an interesting way to get to cool granular datasets.

What's the qualifier in front of Quant?

HauteQuant. It's kind of silly. As in people talk about haute couture.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

It's kind of self-aggrandizing, but what we did was we were kind of inspired by WikiLeaks. So if you look back at WikiLeaks and the Panama Papers, they developed this huge cache of data. They seeded it with all of the major news publications who had it under embargo for a period of months while their investigative journalists worked on it and figured out the narratives and the storylines and what would eventually be the data that they published.

And so using our methodology, we conducted the surveys across five markets: UK, US, the UAE, Singapore and Nigeria to try and get as much coverage as possible without doing something global, which would have taken a very long time and would have been very expensive because we were self-funding it.

And I mean, you've seen the data. What we do with it is it comes out in a huge spreadsheet. It was over 22,000 consumer data points. And we seeded those with some thought leaders. Ed Cotton was one of them, a few others across the UK and the US. And we gave them a couple of weeks to come up with their takes to do fun and interesting things with the data and then to publish on the same day.

And we really, being acutely conscious that no one knew who we were and that we had no audience, we thought, well, it'd be really cool if we got 10 or 20 people interested in it and 50 or 100. And the response was pretty amazing. We got over a thousand share requests, which was pretty cool. And a lot of people who found the data itself interesting and found the way of getting to the data pretty interesting, too. So it was very fun. And we'll be doing more of them. So it's kind of our way of showing what we do and releasing data that we think is important and interesting, but putting it in the hands of other people, importantly.

I had never encountered this idea as a robust methodology. It was so exciting to discover something new . And I'm wondering, did you also experience that thrill? And how have you been met?

It's a great question. I think the fundamental thing to understand about social circle, or certainly the way that I felt about it when we started is when you explain to people, it instinctively feels counterintuitive. Because when you think, if you're asking someone something that is personal, then that person is best in charge of their own subjective experience and how the world feels to them or something like that.

I think the reality is that that may be true. But there are lots of things that get in the way from a research perspective of people answering accurately. And the reality is that people are fantastically complex and unpredictable.

But a lot of the time, from a research perspective, we can be reductive in the way that we go and look for answers. We can start maybe too far down the line to get to the answer that we're trying to get. And so with social circle, I'll give you a couple of examples.

If you were to ask me what I think I'm going to have for dinner on Friday night, and you asked me on a Wednesday, I might say, "Well, I'm going to want to spend some time with my wife and my kids. I love cooking. So I'm going to try and come home from work at five o'clock, and I'm going to cook a meal. And we're all going to sit down and have a lovely Friday night dinner."

Which is a great ambition. And we all have big ambitions that we try to fulfill. If you asked Alfred, my co-founder and a very good friend of mine, "What do you think Sam is going to have for dinner on Friday?" and you asked him on Wednesday, he will probably say to you, "Well, he's going to be running around like a lunatic all week, super busy. I think he's going to end up on Friday afternoon, absolutely exhausted. I'd say that he's probably going to order UberEats and end up on the sofa watching a movie with his partner Lizzie."

Now, which of those is more accurate? You know, my personal ambition, I would say to you today, I'd like to make dinner for my family tomorrow. But the other person's interpretation of what that person is likely to do can often be more accurate than the answer the person is going to give you.

Or to give you an example, we work quite a lot with fashion luxury brands and brands in the consumer sector. So a classic example in that is, if you ask people, let's think of an archetypal luxury product, like a Chanel bag or Rolex. You said to someone who owns a Rolex, "Why do you own a Rolex?" They might give you a story about how it's the ultimate luxury product, it's Swiss horology, the craftsmanship is incredible, the brand has such amazing heritage.

If you asked someone why people generally own Rolexes, they would say immediately something to do with status. And it's a clearer answer. And it's well proven in research in fashion luxury. I mean, these things are status symbols that enable people to walk into a room and feel they're going to be taken seriously, or it makes them feel confident or good about themselves. That's kind of a real answer.

And again, to go back to the political point, I mean, to talk about politics, we know from the outcome this week, that, and this was true of the elections in the past 10 years, that there are secret Republicans or silent Republicans or people who might want to vote Democrat, but don't want to reveal that to their partners. If you ask people from a particular demographic or a particular background about their immediate peer group, generally, you'll get to more accurate answers about the way those people are really feeling.

And that's happened, right? Isn't there - didn't your mentor guy get more accurate results for previous elections?

Yes. The Trump election in 2016, and Brexit, and he was doing this, I think, mostly for private clients, academic institutions. And so the genesis of Early Studies, when he told us about this, we asked if we could use it in a consumer setting. I don't think, especially given that we are imposters in this space, we're both strategists and not researchers. So we're kind of coming at it from an outsider's perspective.

Well, certainly, that was where our previous careers were. You know, to your previous question, we're not coming into research trying to shake things up. I think there are brilliant research methodologies, and there's a place for all of them. What we're trying to do, and what we set out to do was to find a way to access deeper hidden truths about people that can be big competitive advantages for businesses or for anyone that's trying to find new truths or new directions to head in or decisions to make whether they're validating an idea that they want to go forward with or whether they're looking for answers that they really don't have yet. We wanted to find a way that we would want to engage with and interface with if we were on the other side of the table, which we've been on a lot.

Yeah.

So, I can't remember what the question was. But hopefully, that's answered it.

No, it's wonderful. I'm just thinking back, I'm remembering the conversation I had with Phil Barden. And we were talking about the impact of behavioral science, this sort of changing idea of how we think about what it means to be a person, how decisions are made.

It's been a real radical shift in that kind of understanding in the past. I don't know where to date it. But I remember him sort of saying there was a point when all the heads of Kantar, all the big research firms basically had been built on a different foundation. And they needed to kind of shift their authority from an old idea of how people make decisions to a new idea. And they kind of did it without really doing it. It was a sleight of hand a little bit, "We're still doing what we've always done."

But we're not doing it with a new understanding. And so I wonder, and I feel maybe am I making you uncomfortable by - you're being very diplomatic about not coming at the research, but it's a pretty transformational idea that you can't just ask people. I mean, coming out of this election, it does feel like a house of cards where we keep asking people what they think. People keep fixating on this horse race, these margins that don't even exist, really.

Well, speaking post-election, when we've just come out of this cycle, I mean, I woke up yesterday to three different people had sent me the same tweet, people who are close to me who know about Early Studies and what we're doing. And the tweet was a story about a guy who had canvassed in a whole bunch of different states using what he called “The Neighbor Method."

And this tweet had, I think yesterday, about two million views, and using the neighbor method whereby he would knock on people's doors and ask them how their neighbors were going to vote. He had developed a thesis on how he thought each of the swing states were going to go. And he went to the bookies with it, and he won 50 million bucks betting on Trump in the swing states.

And so there are people who are taking this methodology out there in different ways, I guess. I was surprised to hear about it. But it feels like something that maybe is happening in a certain way already.

How to qualify? I mean, you said something interesting about behavioral science. I think that what we miss with research in the way that it's done currently with asking people their opinions, apart from the fact that people are likely to project and manifest and the ego is in the room and gets in the way. A lot of the truth that influences our behaviors and what we do is influenced by the people that we spend time with. So it's culturally and socially influenced. And with Social Circle, you get access to all of that cultural and social influence.

It's there. It's there in the genesis of how you're asking the question. And the other thing that's interesting about it or that's really key to us as a business and how we want to operate is that part of why we started was we wanted to find a way with research that was much faster and was more cost effective.

And we wanted to find a way that could be engaging, that we could engage with collaborators and partners in the way that we did it. So the cool thing about Social Circle surveying is that you have to ask less people in order to get to a representative sample. And what I mean by that and how does it work? If you're asking someone about other people, they answer on behalf of, on average, 15 to 20 people. Now, when you do that at scale, you filter out anomalies and you get all of the groupings or clusters of where people are at.

You get to representativeness much faster, i.e. the points at which the data set doesn't change. We tend to get there by asking, on average, 250 to 350 people. Now, the received wisdom with research is that in order to be representative, you have to ask 2,000 people - seems to become a magic number.

And this is something that we know through our work to be true that we get there much faster. We get to that data set quicker and it's because people are talking on average about more people than just themselves. We sometimes get people who disbelieve that or ask for proof. And we often run much bigger sample sizes and often that's for peace of mind or for optics.

The reality is that we know that we get there very fast. And the other thing, I guess that I'd say about the way that we work is, I think part of what we felt client side and agency side engaging with research was that it often feels like something that's done at arm's length from you. You brief research company, they go and do their work in focus groups or with Quant or whatever, and it comes back to you and you don't get to engage in that process that much as a client or a collaborator.

And as I said at the beginning when we started talking, we really feel that I mean, you're getting to know, trying to understand the way that people think and the why and their motivates and the drivers. This should be the most fascinating part of doing marketing or finding an answer to a business problem.

And so what we do is we test and test and test and test on small sample sizes to first understand the vernacular and vocabulary about how people talk about certain subject matter. And we engage with the client or the people who we're working with all the way along that process.

And that tends to be, depending on how much involvement they want, a really eye-opening and intellectually engaging process where people are fascinated with the way that the results come back and want to pitch in with questions and ideas and ways that they want to come at it. And it's really the getting to the right questions that is part of the journey of discovery that we find so fun and so interesting. Partners that come along with us on that ride.

Yeah. What makes a good question? Because the questions are, I feel going through the census, the questions are beautiful. And they're very sensitively articulated. There's something, they feel real to me. They feel like something I would ask sort of in a conversation. They feel they're really made. Maybe this is the HauteQuant, I'm an American trying to say a French word. Maybe this is what the HauteQuant is. But what has to be true for you to have an effective, what makes a good question for you? When do you know you've found the right question?

That's a great question. So I mean, part of it is one of the things we always say is that we look for signals, not truth. And so what we're trying to do when we're trying to work in that, the whole idea of any kind of market prediction, which is kind of what we're doing with Census 27 and Five Now Three is we're trying to pick up signals for how people believe the world might be in three years' time, five years' time.

But I think when people think of research, they think about trying to get to some kind of objective or unimpeachable truth that is the answer, that is the one. But with anything, lots of things can be true at the same time. So you're looking for new and interesting truths. We say that looking for signals is better than listening to noise. And both those things are better than thinking that you're going to get to an answer that's the objective truth.

Oh, wow. Unpack that for me. That's sort of wonderful. You're saying, yeah, unpack that.

So if you think about the idea of looking for signals, if you have a specific answer that you're looking for, whether it's voter intent or do people prefer Coke or Pepsi or, you know, what makes people support a football club, which is something that we've worked on recently.

What was the question with the football club?

What makes people support a football club?  What makes people want to be a fan? Is it performance? Is it heritage? Is it brand values? Is it blah, blah, blah. In order for something to be true, many things have to be true and validated along that journey. And we like to start from first principles by asking the most naive and broadest questions possible. But also from a perspective, we ask questions that allow people to open up and we see how they talk about it. But then along that road to getting to the end question or the perfect question, it's a process of a lot of it has to do with finding polarity. 

So how can we identify the different types of people who come to that question with different perspectives? We're trying to tease out different ways of looking at things that come from different motivators that might be synonymous or emblematic with different types of people. And this all sounds very theoretical, so I try and ground it in something. 

So, for example, we work with a big sports company client and we're trying to figure out, there's been a huge surge in running over the past few years since COVID. I know it was the New York Marathon on the weekend and lots of people say now that a marathon is now like the fashion week for runners. It's like the major event. 

But one of the things that we've been trying to figure out is, are people running and in exercise generally, do people run for their physical health or has it become more of a mental health exercise? What are the deltas between those two different answers and what types of people might run more for the physical or more for the mental? And one of the ways that we come at that question is that we ask people about their friendship circle. 

And this is a multiple select question with the quantum methodologies that we use. It's all multiple select. So we'll have eight to 10 answers on something and we'll ask people to select as many as they want. 

So the data we get back is the amount of answers that have been clicked on by different segments, blah, blah, blah. But the question, one of our best questions within that sector is thinking of your friends, what is their favoured form of non-pill antidepressant? And so we might list alcohol, illegal drugs, going to the gym, exercising, time with friends and family, being out in nature, etc, etc.

And so it's a very kind of unobtrusive, non-confrontational way of asking a question, but that gives people a really open slate into how they want to answer. So we're not guiding the witness, but giving people an interesting way to think about something and then a bunch of interesting answers. I think the other thing that we really try and do in our work is we try and create a stimulating conversation with respondents as we can, because we want people who are going to be engaged and feel like they're being answered something that gets them to think. 

One of the fundamentals with what we do is we want to give people credit for their complexity, give people credit for their ideas and the way they think. And so we really want to approach in that way and ask questions that we might ask, which we often do, that we ask of friends or family or something that's going to open up and spark ideas and spark an interesting conversation. Another example, I think this one was in Census 27, when we're trying to figure out how people spend their disposable income or what luxury is, what people spend money on. 

You could ask, you know, what are people's favourite luxury products? But then, you know, you might get materialistic things, you're going to kind of cut off experiences, like we try and unpack things that are loaded for people that might get in the way of people thinking expansively about something. We ask thinking of your friends, what do they spend money on where affordable and adequate options exist? 

And then we might say travel, restaurants, clothes, performance wear, which we see huge rises in at the moment, people thinking of the gear that they exercise in as to the point about marathons being fashion weeks for the running community, pieces that have longevity, that are durable. And yeah, those are two examples. We find interesting ways to new truths, new ways to new truths. 

And it sounds like you referenced there's sort of a qualitative phase in the beginning to sort of inform the questions that go in. I guess, is that true? And I'm wondering, what is the role of qualitative in the social circle survey? How do you go about that? 

So, yeah, so in any project, we tend to start with qual because it's going to give us a really good foundation for understanding the thematic makeup of what we're looking at. And then often, you know, we'll move on to a more substantial qual phase before we get to quant. And we treat quant as a validator for all of the findings that we've discovered through qual. 

Sometimes qual will be open-ended questions on online surveys, if it's a discovery thing to try and get to an end study guide for quant output. But we also do qual with expert essays. So a lot of people do expert interviews, which we've done before. 

The cool thing about asking people to write is firstly, again, you get rid of the idea of the immediate discomfort of being in a room with someone who's trying to find the most personal truths about you. And the person is allowed to write an essay, and we call it an essay. Well, we will come up with some really interesting questions, and we ask people to write as much as they can.

How did you come to that idea?

Well, so, I mean, obviously, like the kind of the mainstay of qual is focus groups. And focus groups kind of are the environments in which people are most performative. 

We often say that the focus groups are kind of like speed dating. Everyone's trying to make themselves as attractive or as high status to the rest of the people in the room as they can. And so, actually, it's where you get the most projection and the most manifestation, especially if you've also, if you're putting a product in front of people, what people automatically do, and what skews a lot of findings with focus group qual is that people will put forward negative criticisms of a product, because if you're able to be negative about something, it gives the impression you come from like a deep base of knowledge about something. And so, you get a lot of negativity about products. 

So, to get around that, for example, if we're putting a shoe or a new trainer in front of someone, we might ask, what we like to do is ask people to role play. So, the thing with performativity and manifestation and projection is that people sometimes like lose empathy, and they lose an empathic way of thinking about how people are likely to respond to a product or whatever. We will sometimes ask people to role play as the creative director of the product that's been created. How would you bring this to market? What kind of methods would you use? What media?  How would you position it? By doing that, we get people to think in a more expansive way, and we get people to, if you're asking someone to imagine they were a creative director, you automatically ask them to put themselves in the most creative mindset, rather than that critical mindset. So, that's one of the things. 

These are kind of like, you know, tactical hacks, and we do a lot of these bespoke, just thinking about what we're trying to get to, what the challenge is, and trying to find the most interesting and the most accurate way to get there. The other way is, you know, we have, we do run focus groups sometimes. We tend to prefer the expert essays with qual, but like I said, it is important when you're putting product in front of people, sometimes they can touch and feel it themselves. 

The other thing, we had a project recently with a consumer goods brand where the target audience was young women between the ages of 15 and 25, and the way that we started was with expert essays of 25 to 35-year-olds talking about the younger generation and how they think culture and the world is different for them, and how 

they're likely to engage and interact with their world, whether they think it's, you know, what are the challenges, what's difficult for young women at the moment. 

The next step was what we call the unfocused groups, where we got a group of those young women in that target audience together, but we asked them to reflect on their own social circles, to think of the different types of archetypes that make up that

friendship group, and whether it's choosing a product that they think would fit with a certain type of person, what would work with someone who's big into raving, going out late at night, what works with the real fashion maven, someone who's always up with the cultural trends, et cetera. 

But we're always trying to dislocate the question from the ego or the personality and the nexus of projection and manifestation that that person is likely to come from when they answer. So it's always others. That's beautiful. 

It's wonderful. We're kind of near the end of time. And I mean, you kicked up so much stuff right there, talking about qual. And I feel like when I came up, I haven't done groups in a long time. Online, I feel like groups are kind of a layer of hell. I haven't figured out a way to do that.  I'm so happy about Zoom. But I was taught, we never did introductions in the beginning. We never have, I think it's standard practice in a focus group to have people sort of give their name, like where they come from and all this stuff.  And I was taught, there was these few things I taught, like you never have anybody introduce themselves because it invites a social hierarchy into the room. And we have everybody write down answers so that they commit to their thing. And then the other one, which I always talk about, is like never asking why.  And I feel like everything you're doing, I just have a lot of alignment around. Because it's imagination. It's really valuing the power of our imagination to understand the world and sort of just really just centering it, to use that language, right? 

Yeah. Yeah, I think you nailed it. And like I said, people are complex and unpredictable. So we have to give reverence to that idea and allow people to be complex and unpredictable. 

That's like a new move though, in a way. I mean, I feel like isn't the quantitative industry, like your preface, right? That people are complex. So we have to shove them into these boxes and we have to measure them and turn them into numbers. Like that's the usual move, is to do that, right? But what you're doing feels a little bit more, certainly is a hell of a lot more nuanced and more complex than... 

Well, thank you. I don't know if it's necessarily better. It's just our way.

I guess what I'm saying, like when I do... You talk about doing free association and projective techniques with people, and sometimes it makes people uncomfortable. They don't really want to think about it. They don't want to know that there are these factors that shape our behavior. Do people immediately understand the social intelligence that your methodology leverages? Do they get it?  And they go, oh, I will totally make a business decision based on gossip.

Yeah. Well, so you're talking about from like a partner or client perspective, will they immediately get it? I guess so, yeah. I mean, the reality is that in a process of a project, we start with being as expansive as we can and discovering and finding out the guardrails for what we're doing. And through a process of testing and iterating to your question about people wanting to do free association or whatever, because we test and iterate so fastidiously, we find out, is this an answer that turns people... Is this a question that turns people off? Is it a question that makes people feel uncomfortable? 

Oh, you're talking about the research subjects? 

Yeah. 

Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking more clients, like when you're sitting in front of them and you're saying, you know what, I'm going to help you make this very significant business decision, and we're going to build it on what you might call gossip, but actually is a sort of a more, it's the infrastructure for decision making. 

Well, yeah, I think it's a good question. We tend to, I mean, you know, there are always going to be, there's people who buy in and people who don't. We find that when people start working with us, they often really like understand the validity of the process and what we get to. 

And I think that the important thing to know is that once we get to the end, when we're really trying to get to the point, the sharp end of making a recommendation and getting to the process, we've gone through not just testing, but several points of validation where anything expansive and freely associated and gossipy is then brought into a phase where we can validate per market, per generation, per segment and start and segment and size an audience. 

So when we get down to the end, it's very scientific, you know? And so, yeah, I think that the gray area becomes much more black and white by the time that we get through the middle and towards the end. 

And I guess last question, because this feels like something that you really built for yourselves, you know what I mean? You're sort of solving your own problem. What do you love about it?  And what does it do for a strategist, for a team? What does it make possible that wasn't possible before? 

It's a great question. I think that, again, like the genesis of it for me was when I worked at VICE, the Insights team in the US built a product called VICE Insights, which was like a super scrappy research tool where we could take a brief and we could condense it into five to 10 questions that were fundamental to answering the brief. We would then serve that in a high-performing article because we had a very engaged youth audience. 

We would get a sample of between 250 to 350 people back within a couple of days. And we started to base all of our responses to briefs on primary data. And really, what I felt at the time was it gave so much integrity to the work that we were doing, but didn't have to go to a third-party source for data that's publicly available that anyone who might be pitching against us could access. 

And I had the feeling at the time that this is just how marketing should be done, that data shouldn't be gatekept. There should be faster and cheaper ways to generate primary data sets. And we kind of think about what we're trying to do is the primary data revolution, that you should be able to mine and create primary data sets that give you the answers that you're looking for. 

So that was where it came from for me. And when I left VICE, I really missed working in that way. And I wanted to stitch together a way of doing strategy that way. 

When we finally did it, I think we came to the realization, OK, we're now a research company, and we're going to do research this way, and our product is research. To answer your question about what I most enjoy about it, I think, firstly, it's hugely validating that in year one, we're managing to bring a lot of really cool businesses and a lot really, really interesting people along with us. But also the process, and we're always very pleasantly surprised when we give a presentation about data, that whether it's the questions that we're asking or our process or how we're getting to them, that we're always surprised by how engaged people are and how many questions people have about it. 

And people tend to be fascinated by social circle survey and the way that we go about finding these answers. That's incredibly enjoyable. Also, intellectually, like I said, I think that finding out the real drivers and motivators that underpin consumer behavior and finding interesting ways to pick up these signals and figure it out is a hugely rewarding intellectual challenge that I will speak for myself and Alfred, that we find incredibly rewarding and fun and engaging every time we do it still, long may that continue. 

The great thing is that with the right partners who want to be on that journey too, that when they get involved and we end up solving problems together, and everyone chipping in on what the questions should be, that's probably when it gets its most fun and most rewarding. I guess I think the other point, which is probably a good one to end on, is that we are founded on a genuine belief that if we can become a society that's more geared towards asking more interesting questions of ourselves, of each other, and of the problems that we face, that fundamentally that's a healthier, better functioning society that's better for everyone. We say that the answer is better questions and that's an answer to, I guess, a lot of different things that we're facing. 

I completely am aligned with you there. I would love to close there, but you mentioned primary data revolution and I can't let that go unquestioned. What are you referring to or what do you mean when you talk about a primary data revolution? 

When we're talking about primary data sources, we're talking about data that's created specifically for the problem in hand. Rather than third-party data or secondary data or publicly available data, being able to say, okay, this is what we're trying to figure out. This is the business problem that you might get faced as a strategist or as someone who works inside an organization. Here's a bunch of ways or hypotheses that we have about the subject matter. Here's a bunch of assumptions. Once we get those assumptions out, can we find ways to go out into the field, as it were, and find real answers from real people that help us to find the solution to that problem? 

Again, sometimes it's finding an answer from scratch. Sometimes it's validating an answer that may be right, but being able to come to data sets that allow you to make those decisions with confidence very, very fast and in as creative and an interesting and innovative way as possible. Again, it sounds self-aggrandizing when I hear it coming out of my own mouth, but yeah, the primary data revolution. 

Yeah. It's good. 

It's wonderful. I really appreciate it. It was a pleasure talking with you. 

I really appreciate you accepting the invitation to come here. Yeah, I'm excited to see what you guys are doing. 

Pleasure was all mine, Peter. Thank you so much for the invitation. It was great to talk to you. 

All right. Cheers. Have a good one. 

See ya. 

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