"For years now the dominant paradigm of market research has been 'me' research. If we want to know what consumers feel, think of what they'll do, we ask them. The problem with that, however, is that we're often unreliable witnesses to our own motivations as we, as human beings, generally tend to self-deceive ourselves," Popper argued.
Hence a growing number of new market research techniques centred on the 'we', the 'wisdom of crowds' and behavioural economics are evolving, some of which having been successfully applied by his research company, delivering great results for clients, and others still in an experiential stage.
Mass prediction, for example, has been leveraged for new product innovation by asking people to imagine they owned shares in a number of new product ideas. By indicating which ones they'd buy more of or which ones they'd sell, they're not answering for themselves, but for other people, with astonishingly accurate results, Popper pointed out.
Mass prediction is also increasingly being applied to gauge box office successes over opening weekends as well as of events and programmes such as American Idol to source talent from the crowd, screen for potential and own the output - "a brilliant business model".
The results of these predictive models have not only revealed proven accuracy, but also greater product discrimination (versus monadic testing) as well as the ability to spot breakthrough ideas, Popper stressed.
"Again, human beings are innately really good at observing and copying others, so, instead of using a professionally trained ethnographer, a crowd of consumers are used for this purpose," he explained.
"Mass ethnographic research, for example, proved highly successful in a research study on binge drinking in Newcastle pubs in the UK where the results revealed that everybody unconsciously starts drinking when fancy dress is allowed."
By using the Internet and free public available data to do research, 'netnography' also provides some interesting insights, for example about the spread of the actual swine flu virus as opposed to the 'mind' virus. At the same time, it provided interesting insights into some cultural beliefs around the virus.
A new development of the agency, is the introduction of the digital characters that provide direct insights into the lives of the target audience.
"In very basic terms DigiViduals are robotic researchers programmed to represent a particular type of person, conducting automated mass web ethnography to build up a rich, detailed picture of their lives from which understanding, insights and new product ideas can be generated.
"These are designed as a person, such as 'Nicole' on Twitter: they scan for tweets that match their key words, characteristics and emotions, collect the relevant tweets, blogs, images, video uploading from those people and build a rich and insightful picture of character's life, from which we can generate understanding, insights and new product ideas," Popper explained.
Lastly, the concept of co-creation has also been very successfully introduced, among others by Goldcorp Red Lake Mine, which harnessed the technique to find new gold deposits. The company opened up its 'crown jewels', its geographical maps, to consumers who helped them find enough gold to reposition the company as one of the most successful in the world, Popper said.
Initial results of these new and innovative research tools are not only very promising but in certain instances astonishingly accurate, offering clients whole new and exciting array of research options to obtain market insights, Popper believes.
