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Important that you sit through this one right until the end.

Wouldn't it be great if all participants in a group discussion were like this?

Devo (a band) and—according to this video—Mother L.A., have decided to focus group the public to determine every decision it makes on the band's costumes, brand color, icons and even the vocal style and instrumentation on the songs for its upcoming album. The band, Warner Brothers and the agency are asking the public to engage in a series of studies to help do so, the first being a color prefrence study. The video and test appear on the band's fan site ClubDevo.com.

For the record, these are NOT focus groups....

A really fun bit of creative...

Is twitrratr possibly the most useless piece of analysis software ever? Well maybe things will move on but check it out for yourself. Twitrratr is designed to 'track opinions on twitter'. The logic of this claim would dictate that you should get a good temperature read on any given subject.

My subject of choice was 'the irish government'. A topic like this should result in some level of polarisation in opinion - given the economic recession, the governments' abject failure in the opinion polls and Brian Cowen's popularity ratings. Nope. Not on twitrratr. 86% of twitter posts about the Irish Government are neutral.

What does this tell us? Well it tells us something very important...social media like twitter are probably best used for understanding consumer attitudes at a qualitative level. The nature of this kind of media is to give people time and space to comment in their own language. They can post opinions and converse with other people. This is the domain of qualitative research.

As a tool for qualitative enquiry, social media is very strong. But, like any form of qualitative research, it relies upon the interpretative skills of the researcher. Mechanised tools like twitrratr will tell you very little on their own. However, a good qualitative researcher could learn quite a lot by reading the so called 'neutral' posts and starting a conversation with the folks who have tweeted some of them. Who you speak to is the key.

Twitter has huge potential to help us understand consumers, voters and people in general. Indeed, entire research agencies have been established to use social media (such as twitter) to help with co-creation. All of this is evidence of the opportunity for qualitative research. The challenge, however, is to avoid services like twitrratr giving 'tracking opinions on twitter' a bad name.

Qualitative Research in 2010. Technologies are merging. 80% of the population have an iPad - or microsoft's equivalent. Group discussions in the market research world are increasingly online. But those that do take place to face are increasingly making more use of newer technologies. Gone are the days of flip charts and post it notes. Instead the best moderators are using technology in clever ways to capture consumer responses instantly for faster more robust insights. Moderator or machine?

Well ultimately I believe you still need the skills of a trained moderator to unlock the truth behind people's emotions. But when you see software like childline's remixing tool in action we will all have to accept that technology could be used to re-invigorate how emotion is measured.

Imagine you are a brand owner trying to unlocking the a powerful emotional insight behind your brand. Traditional projective techniques are par for the course - personification, story-telling, brand scripts. All of these are useful methods that qualitative researchers use to dig a little deeper.

But the potential behind something like the emotion remixing tool is to genuinely put the power of projection in consumers' hands - literally. As a researcher I'd love to get my hands on a tailor made emotion remixer and use it in group discussions or depth-interviews as an engaging piece of stimulus that could bring real energy to a discussion.

Perhaps respondents are some way off being comfortable with this type of technology. But I believe the future of projective techniques could include using technologies as sophisticated as this....

You can read an interesting article from Sumit Roy here. Sumit comes from univbrands, an Indian organization that advocates learning by 'doing'.

The article discusses an insight generation tool that he uses to identify that much sought after 'Aha Moment'. He uses a tool called an Aha tree like to one below. To me a tool like this is a useful way of structuring thinking and arguably another twist on Laddering. But I'm not sure it will work for all research questions were insight is the objective.

The Aha tree might be a useful start point for developing an initial theory or hypothesis on any given topic. Yes I agree with Sumit that observation and projective techniques can help reach the Aha moment. But not everyone is going to use a technique like this in the right way.

Ultimately the rigour of well designed qualitative research will be much more powerful than Sumit's 'on the hoof' insight generation. Decide for yourselves...

You may have seen this before but it is something worth remembering about the human brain. Information processing occurs in an 'holistic' fashion. The information receiver decodes symbols very quickly even if they are not in the 'correct' order. Clearly this has implications for how marketers structure their message - simplicity is the key to cut through...