We’re two Quirk’s Events into our three-event 2019 schedule, having just completed the Brooklyn event and about a week away from the Chicago event at the time of this writing, and it’s got me thinking about trends.
I’ve never been much for trends, at least when they pertain to marketing research, which is not ideal for someone who does what I do for a living. Editors, especially at B2B outlets, are generally all about trends – writing about them, dissecting them, assessing their potential longevity. We get asked all the time: “What trends are you seeing?”
My trend-wariness stems from the fact that while many trends are certainly real – born of market or social forces or the advent of new technologies – I feel like some are manufactured or are at least open to a chicken-or-egg kind of debate. Is it a trend because you and a few other people labeled it as such and started talking about it? Or were enough people talking about it that it became a trend as the din grew louder?
It’s just seemed to me over the years that quite often in our industry (and no doubt in many others) trends have agendas behind them. Especially since the rise of social media, you get a few loud-talkin’ CEOs or other organizational mouthpieces tweeting or posting “articles” on LinkedIn or speaking at conferences about a technique or method or movement that happens to be part of their companies’ offerings and it can start to feel like a trend, even though it’s manufactured instead of organic.
All of this musing comes about as I reflect on the array of sessions at this year’s Quirk’s Events. From the beginning, we’ve generally eschewed session tracks (not that we won’t ever try doing some!), mostly because we try to avoid shoehorning presenters into one theme just to fit our programming needs. And, too, I’m more comfortable with spreading topics out across the day rather than forcing someone to stay in the same room for a whole morning or afternoon because that’s where all the sessions for one track are.
Plus, despite all of one’s best efforts in vetting a presenter, there are no guarantees they will stay on-topic and deliver on the promises made by their session title and description. So that talk on behavioral economics and CX might end up spending precious little time on either topic.
What do tracks have to do with trends? Well, session tracks can be mileposts on the road to a trend. You go to enough conferences and see enough similarly themed tracks and – voila! – you start seeing trends. And while thinking about things in terms of frameworks like trends can be great for making change seem more manageable and understandable, I guess I’d rather take a different tack and that’s been reflected in the way our Quirk’s Event sessions are assembled.
There’s so much change afoot in how you researchers do your jobs and while I certainly don’t think using trends as a lens through which to view that change is potentially harmful, it just feels more beneficial to steer clear of categories or strict rubrics. Listening to the many passionate, enthusiastic speakers at our London and Brooklyn gatherings, one of the main qualities researchers seem to need today is flexibility. Rather than getting distracted by where trends are pointing and what processes are involved, it feels more worthwhile to focus on outcomes and deliverables.
As new tools and new ways of using them keep cropping up, you’re almost being forced to learn and react on the fly. Getting bogged down in labels (Qual or quant? UX or MR?) feels like self-limiting behavior, especially when your end-clients likely don’t think in those terms – they just want their questions answered. The more you can be open to new ways of thinking, new ways of approaching and solving problems, the better prepared you’ll be to handle whatever comes at you.