ORIGINAL VOICE: the most important goal for market researchers

it's an AI world. everyone seems to be "experimenting". whether it is universities, governments, companies from market research to marketing to procurement to, well, everything. AI to take short cuts, drive efficiency, deal with vast data, write a report, create a TV commercial (yes my beloved, favorite brand Coca-Cola remaking it's classic Xmas ad and many others )... 

STOP ... OK we get it. 

everyone is doing the AI thing.

and that is all GREAT. if you know me you know i have been using AI and LLM platforms for doing market research for near a decade. i have shared lots of cases of doing so at lots of conferences around the world. FYI what amazes me is that up until 2 years ago when i presented those cases at marketing/market research conferences it was met with "yes, well, its not real research if your using these platforms is it?" type comments. 

but since the GPT “revolution” it seems every speaker at every conference seems to need to talk about AI, even if only in passing. Often when the actual use of AI is incidental to what the real story is or could be, and often when the use of AI is nothing original at all. AI has become a sort of legitimacy.

that is all fine and dandy.

BUT 

the risk is always "sameness". 

think about the recent trend on LinkedIn...people saying "I asked GPT, or another platform, to create an image of me based on what it knows of me". and to be honest they nearly all look pretty much the same. same style of design and artwork, same imagery, same background going off in to a futuristic background. So many AI driven visuals all remind me of the old sci-fi magazines I read as a kid in the 60s. I tried it. same thing. weird. especially given i actually work from home in an apartment stuffed with books and old asian furniture. 

think too about using platforms to write reports, articles, summaries of research studies, sales tools, etc etc. notice how they sort of all seem to read and sound the same. now of course i can say "dear AI platform please use my previous reports as a style guide to write a report that sounds like i wrote it". and what you get is that...what you sort of would write like/sound like based on passed behavior.

BUT 

well i don’t know about you but i have found people don’t hire me to sound like a i used to sound. they hire me to be think and say and explain different, to be original. every project, every client, every situation.

take my "history of men’s underwear" speech. probably delivered to 70-80 conferences and events in 20+ countries. never exactly the same. I get asked "hey that was great , can you do it again for our event in Paris next april?". and sure i do. but it will have changed. because the audience is different, the event is different, my knowledge of the subject will have evolved, i will pull out some different examples, my mood will be different, my language different. you get it. same basic message but every time is "original".

this morning a i spent an how on zoom with a new contact in the USA talking about ageing populations. at some stage she stopped and said, literally, "hey you have some original ideas but you also have an original way of explaining the issues"...original.

now back to all those people talking at conferences. conferences of all types. all forcing the term "AI" in but few explaining in an original way how they used it "originally".

of course new tech always is seen as blocking originality. socrates thought that a standardized alphabet and the ability of all to learn to use it to read and write was a bad idea because it would mean everyone copied what they read and stopped thinking ... no originality !! the same happened when gutenberg invented ( well sort of ) printing. the intellectual class worried that mass distribution of books would lead to less thinking, more copying. and so on and so on. remember when the internet was "hot" and the world figured out our kids could copy and past cliff notes and not learn for themselves and write original essays!

BUT

here is the thing...new tech does not mean easier means to copy and cheat. it can just mean more efficiency to collect, sort and prioritize more sources with some new presentation tools ( clay, papyrus, velum, paper, radio, film, text, etc etc ). the real trick for the winners was and is originality. 

lots of people in 16-17th century england could write and tried writing plays and poems...but that guy from stratford-upon-avon was original. 

how to use the new tech and mediums to say things in a unique way that caught attention? that is what has and will make a difference. mark earls got it right in his seminal book “copy, copy, copy”…don’t waste time on being totally original, focus on using ideas in an original way.

so what ? 

well think about the switch that is finally happening with so-called, and I have always argued incorrectly labelled, “secondary research”. a decade ago LLMs like SQREEM and SignificanceSystems hit the market. they could find anything on the internet ( not just social media ), collate 1,000s of pieces of content, read it all, segment it, summarise and analyse emotional intent in hours what would have taken a team of the best secondary researchers years. no human needed. except … well very quickly we figured out they were needed. to take the findings and find the implications, express what was discovered in a way individual clients found interesting or useful, or entertaining. because while platforms make access easier they need help to suit each audience.

lesson learned : tech helps make what seemed overwhelming possible … having an originalvoice makes it not just more accessible, it makes it more interesting.

think about the decades old struggle to get market research companies to use their greatest resource : aggregating their past studies to provide learning rather than initiating new studies. logic says if you have done 1,000 or more studies you should have the cumulative wisdom to provide the answer needed. yes the thing big consultancies do. now, more than ever we are seeing many MR companies developing AI platforms. recently I have seen many major business consultants saying that any company developing it’s own platform is just being wasteful .. “buy access to one of the giants and learning to do something unique” is the advice. obvious but too often forgotten. remember beta video? because you can develop a different type of a tech is not good enough. what you need to do is something original with the tech. just as SONY did when they learnt that while beta video tapes might be better the money was being original and owning the content on other platforms.

lesson learned : it’s not about developing AI, let the specialists do that. It’s about using it to create original output by taking your individual, company skill and talent to be different.

and so it goes with all the “issues” we see being talked about so much of late : synthetic data ( an issue that has been around for decades but now being “rediscovered”), the use of qual on mass, the universal need to understand “what really matters to people” ( my mantra for 30 years ). all of these have and will continue to be addressed by new tech. 

what will matter for researchers be how they do it, how they present it. because at the end of the day businesses do not hire methodology, they hire belief. belief in the people offering the solution, the results. and to discern yourself in a world of increasing tech “originalvoice” matters

and that is what #originalvoice is about. an idea borrowed from the art world where the concept is a century old. use the mediums, use all the latest short cuts and tools and tech ... but make sure the output is unique to you.

it is a subject i am and will be talking about more

a little , and obvious, 2025 prediction ... AI won’t go away, how we deal with it, take advantage of it and stay original will be one HOT issue 

*dave spent a decade as a librarian before a near 40 year career in advertising and brand marketing as a researcher and strategist. based in Bangkok now he has lived in Asia for 30 years. he stopped using spellcheck and all forms of grammar software when he realised they were taking away his originality. use the hashtag #originalvoice to join the debate