A healthy dose of insight

My wife is currently studying medicine – through Google, it seems.

Whenever she or one of our sons is sick, her first port of call is always to type some pithy description of the symptoms into the search field. That way, she can at least rule out any terminal diseases before preparing herself for discussions with her assistants at the local surgery. It all comes down to access to the right information – not that there's anything wrong with that.

But what I'm finding more and more is that the age-old adage knowledge is power is no longer true.

In fact, it's now more accurate to say that information is power.

And that, I think, is a problem because you'd have to be crazy not to acknowledge the gulf that exists between the two (as does my wife, fortunately).

Knowledge comes through understanding and experience, whereas information simply litters our lives, an often random sequence of data, symbols and other bits and pieces. Knowledge makes sense of information, whereas information on its own can often be senseless, unless of course you know what to do with it.

Which brings me to research.

Focus groups are typically the whipping boy for why research is so often so flawed, but that's too easy and obvious a target – plus, my friend Ingrid over at Aesthetics of Joy (the Christmas trees, remember) already wrote this article a few years ago that perfectly summarises the bigger issues.

But what frustrates me is the seemingly blind proliferation of information churned out by your typical research agency.

They can tell you what was said. In fact, they'll happily write dozens of slides in 8-point type, and even throw in the odd piece of Clipart for a little light relief – if there's space on the slide, they'll be sure to fill it.

But they can rarely tell you what it means.

They'd rather leave that to a mother of two from Castle Hill who you've just paid $80 for 90 minutes of her time to design the pack or write the tagline for you. Easier than making the decision yourself, plus you've now got someone to blame just in case.

Research has its role to play and there can be no doubt that the most successful brands are consumer-informed, but they are never consumer-led. If that was the case, then we'd all be riding faster horses, to paraphrase Henry Ford.

In the case of research, knowledge typically makes sense of information through insight.

But unless more research agencies are able to transform all this information into even the smallest morsel of insight, then my wife may not be the only one turning to Google for the answers.