South asian parents hate saying “I love you” in person. Instead they say things like “when can we expect to see a grandchild?”. I’m not annoyed. They mean the best.
2023 was incredibly good for me. If I could change anything, I wish the number of people in my friend circle remained the same. However, a crippling economy and an incredibly poor selection of life partners on their part makes it impossible for someone to hold on to his friends.
I’m not an asshole. Let me explain.
The crippling economy bit is fairly straightforward. Google “Sri Lanka economic crisis” and you will get why people are selling whatever they have to get out of the country.
It’s the other one I struggle to understand. Why do people change everything about themselves for someone else, continue to let their personality erode, while sneaking out once in a while to bitch about that person with friends? How does one abandon everything about themselves and give into social pressure the moment they turn 30?
It’s like clockwork.
And soon they will embark on a journey of child-rearing to try to find some meaning to their dreadfully repressed lives. From there, one progresses to adultery and substance abuse.
And they say weed is a gateway drug.
So, when my parents ask “when can we expect grandchildren?” I know they don’t mean “why haven’t you ruined your life yet?”. They probably wish for me to complete their checklist (the one with, college, job, marriage, house, car).
Anyway, enough of this depressing intro. I’ll get to the point already. What I am feeling is either specific to me, or (and more possibly) there’s a huge market for couple mental health, therapy, training, guidance, coaching etc. in developing nations?
Let me know if you have thoughts. Now, here are some quick reads.
We’re planning a trip to Spain in August (my wife, our thirdwheel and I). Can’t wait to see a ton of Dali’s work. This one’s a favourite. Let me know if you have suggestions.
How to do market research when formal research is too expensive for the client:
Talk to people
You don’t need a research agency to start a conversation. Talk to your taxi driver. Talk to your spouse’s friends and family. Strike up a conversation with the cashier at the supermarket.
In my experience, no tool is as effective as having a genuine conversation with your audience. And most of the time, it costs nothing.Create and run a survey
Platforms like Pollfish, Google Surveys, and YouGov let you serve questionnaires to any audience that you specify. They are easy to run and they you will get your findings fast.Interrogate AI personas
I use the Yabble plugin on ChatGPT to create AI personas. Yabble creates a list of questions that it will ask the AI personas. Tweak it a bit and send it off. You will get the results instantly and can ask the AI more questions based on the findings.
Warning: AI lies.Read high quality journals
Like websites or the news, not all journal articles are credible. I use Google Scholar + ResearchRabbit to find the most cited, well reviewed articles.Run A/B tests
A/B testing is a powerful tool to understand how different people respond to different messages. At Fudge, we run tests to determine what interventions can have the most impact in changing a specific behaviour.This being said, sometimes, formal research is the only answer. The most understated part of research is the person in charge of communicating, understanding, and implementing the research. The way a question is phrased can change the answer you get.
Consider what you will lose if the marketing activity fails. If the loss is minimal, maybe formal research can be optional. If not, bite the bullet and spend on a research agency.
A big shoutout to Breakthrough Intelligence, who helps Fudge with all of our serious research projects.
Read of the month
In research the “what” can often be more important than the “why”.
When you ask someone, "Which brand did you buy?" they can answer easily. But ask "Why that brand?" and things get tricky. Most people can't really say why. Because they don’t know.
If they did, the answer would be something like “They spend so much to advertise on TV. That tells me they have a lot to lose by selling me a substandard product”
You can be fairly certain that 99.9% of your customers will not give you that kind of answer. They will instead give you a post-rationalised answer. Because that’s what we’re hardwired to do.
These reasons aren't very helpful for businesses.
What's important is the actual choice people made. That’s the "what."
That's why I like A/B testing. It shows what people really pick when given options. The reasons why? Brands can always create the “why”.
Humans are tricky. We don’t always know why they do what they do.
Read this before you settle in at work this year:
The right way to evaluate an agency
Look at past work. Can they show past results?
Speak to existing clients. Can they verify the things the agency says?
Audit the people. Look at their individual track records. Make sure these people are the people who will work with your brand.
Speak to them. Ask them questions.
Test. Work with them on a low value project. See if you click.
How not to evaluate an agency
Ask them for free strategy and give them false promises of future work
Devalue their work in hopes of getting discounts and freebies
Impose your creative direction on them and see if the outcome pleases your wife an that one cousin who used to work in advertising
This is a non-exhaustive list.
If you are a no-nonsense business who wants to work with a no-nonsense agency, Fudge has one open position. We service clients from all 5 continents of the world.
For the fellow strategists reading this. Here’s a collection of award-winning strategy papers that I obviously stole from someone on the internet.
On AI: Asking the right questions > Tools. But here are some tools anyway.
Perplexity.ai - I use this to find credible sources to start my research.
Pros: Gives you sources and a good summary Cons: The interpretation of data is sometimes awful. The GPT4 enabled ‘co-pilot’ feature doesn’t add much value.Yabble Plugin on ChatGPT - I use this on to create AI personas and ask them questions. Later I test these answers with real people.
Pros: Helps you refine and add questions for real people
Cons: Sometimes, the plug-in acts wonky and gets the brief completely wrong. Costs $20/monthResearch Rabbit - This is a fun new tool that I use to find sources fast and effectively. I love the cool map feature that visualizes authors and data sources.
Pros: It’s free Cons: Sometimes it groups unrelated articles together.ChatGPT - Can’t not mention the OG. I use it to generate broad hypotheses and started market research. The trick is to ask GPT to use it’s training data set and nothing else.
Pros: The gallery of plugins Cons: It liesConsensus - Scans academic journals and gives a summary of what the community thinks on a specific subjects.
Pros: Saves a ton of time scanning through individual articles. Cons: The results you get is heavily dependent on the queries you type inNotably - I’m sure this app has more useful features, but I use it to get insights from interview transcripts. It helps me identify recurring themes and patterns
Pros - Saves the time it takes to read through long interview transcripts Cons - I have not used it enough to list down the cons. It’s not free is definitely one.Elicit - It offers 3 unique workflows for researchers. 1) Extract information from PDFs (2) Discover concepts across papers (3) Find scientific research papers. Each workflow is similar to some of the other tools I spoke about before. But no one has all three of these together.
Pros - It’s free Cons - The summaries are not always accurate
Bye till next time. If you enjoyed this, send it to a friend.