Two years ago I presented the MindTime segmentation technique (now called SmartSlices) to the CEO of a market research company and his senior research staff. Later that day he told me that, given what I had just shown them—a way of measuring and segmenting audiences by people’s most fundamental and predictive behavioral drivers, he was unsure that the panels they recruited from their database of research participants properly represented their clients’ target audiences. In fact, he realized, they truly had no idea if even their database was composed of a proper balance of the possible basic types of thinkers. Could it be that people who signed up to be on these kinds of research panels were doing so because of a shared behavioral driver, and others, who did not share their hidden need, were not represented at all?

Six months ago a leading research company who provides research communities to major brands, used our audience segmentation and intelligence technology to map one of its many market research communities. Having mapped all of one community’s members they then correlated this segmented behavioral and attitudinal data against brand sentiment data on ten top brands collected from these same community members.

The first of many insights we quickly gained was that the community they had just mapped was not at all representative of a general audience (and its behavioral make up). In fact, it was decidedly skewed towards just two of the three fundamental thinking perspectives, and predictably, these were the types of people who would willingly sign up to participate on a regular basis in a market research community. The problem was that these might not be the kinds of people whose opinions and sentiments the brand clients were interested in learning, they certainly were not a good cross-section of what you would find in an everyday population, the innovators and idea people were missing.

A few days later I was speaking to the person who had originally made the introduction for us to the branded community provider. When I told him about the growing evidence we were accumulating that these panel communities being used in market research might not be representative of an actual audience at all, and were biased towards certain kinds of thinking behaviors, he told me that to tell the “client” this would be like telling someone that their child is ugly. Fair point.

Right now, I am sitting looking at a map of 400+ respondents who were part of a panel recruited to participate in a market research survey for a major international Telcom brand. Embedded in this survey were our nine survey items—the MindTime Profile. These survey items allow us to map people’s perceptions and thinking within the MindTime framework, a powerful constant that can be used, among many other things, to develop personas in market research. The company actually conducting the survey had been instructed to recruit the research panel from small business decision makers, the brand’s target audience for a new product.

There is little doubt in my mind (and in that of our chief scientists), that once again we are seeing a decided bias in the make-up of the panel audience. It is skewed away from the very people whose reactions to the new product the brand is trying to understand (early adopters) and towards people who might predictably agree to participate in panel based audience research.

Let’s talk about that ugly baby for a moment. A mother and father cannot do anything about their baby’s unfortunate circumstance (other than becoming less shallow themselves). However, market researchers who recruit panels to conduct audience research can do something about their ‘ugly baby.’ Given that they have been aware of these biases in audience composition for a long time, although in their defense the solutions available to remedy them were inadequate for sure. Today there are much more powerful tools available to help them rethink their recruitment practices and screen to ensure these biases are accounted for. In fact, intellectual honesty now demands that this issue no longer be overlooked.

We have now identified a major methodology flaw in market research studies that do not account for the thinking style of their research panels and target audience. The results will therefore be flawed. Screening for thinking style profile data should be standard for any research and audience identification initiatives, similar to other demographics (i.e. sex, age, income, etc.). The benefit of capturing this thinking style data is that it also provides a powerful way to segment audiences by a behavioral constant.

Key Takeaways

• Thinking style identification should be performed at the panel recruitment level 
• Assure thinking style composition of research panels is comparable to target audience 
• Attitudinal and behavioral data should be correlated with thinking style to obtain predictive insights
• Collecting thinking style data should be as common practice as any other key demographic

I was recently reading the Epicenter Blog from Wired (April 8^th, 2011). There was a guest blog by Sir James Dyson, best known for inventing the Dual Cyclone Bagless Vacuum Cleaner.

Although the point of the article is more about reforming education to encourage creative thinking and learning by doing (and failing) – a point that was made very well by the way; I was struck more by the inventor’s passion, persistence, and optimism in the future when faced with failure.

According to Dyson, inventing “is a never ending process that is enormously rewarding, and endlessly frustrating.

There are countless times an inventor can give up on an idea. By the time I made my 15^th prototype, my third child was born. By 2,627, my wife and I were really counting our pennies. By 3,727, my wife was giving art lessons for some extra cash. These were tough times, but each failure brought me closer to solving the problem. It wasn’t the final prototype that made the struggle worth it. The process bore the fruit. I just kept at it.” 

I have never met Mr. Dyson, and he, as far as I know, has never taken the MindTime Profile. So I don’t know what type of thinker he actually is. However, his foresight, optimism and willingness to risk it all certainly are characteristics that I would expect to find in a future thinker, his engineering brilliance however, comes from a past perspective which he blends into his visionary thinking.

What type of thinker are you? Find out more about yourself and those around you by completing the free MindTime profile. It is offered at MindTime Maps, or you can now take it on facebook. Either way, enjoy it, share it with friends and family, and if you have a chance, visit us on our facebook page and let us know what you think.

The issues is this. Everything that is going wrong in our physical world is not the result of our physical actions, well at least not in the first instance. Our physical actions are the result of our thinking. It is to our thinking that we must first look to change to solve our problems, that is where the solutions to our problems lie, in the way we use our thinking. The results are all too obvious.

In every culture there is the power of thought

In every people the power to create

What if collective thought was the catalyst that released a nation’s genius

What if what we are witnessing is the emergence of collective creative thought

What if we could accelerate this

What if it is actually happening

~ John

For your chance to win a book in February (and March), simply visit one of our facebook pages and join our group (or double your chances and join both groups):

MindTime: “It’s All About Time” Facebook page

OR

MindTime Facebook Page

In addition to having a chance to win a copy of the book, you are invited to join the discussions on our pages.

Have you taken our MindTime Profile yet? Share your results on our MindTime wall. Any surprises or questions  - let us know.  John will be checking in and contributing to the discussions along the way.

Have you had the opportunity to read “It’s All About Time” already? Or maybe you’ve read excerpts from the book on our blog or on facebook? If so, what do you think? Any questions?  If you haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, you can follow along on our MIndTime: “It’s All About Time” wall as we will be re-posting content from the book on this page.

Hope to see you there!