TBWA\Dublin, the Disruption® Company, has launched 100 Voices, a new online research panel, that helps their clients access consumer view points in over 35 global markets in a fast, cost-effective manner. Each panellist is an articulate and primed contributor to our always-on, in-market cultural enquiries and we focus on diverse representation and the platforming of unique voices.
The panel goes beyond standard qual research, looking for acuteness and the edge of prevalent trends. We use the panel for multi-market positioning projects, behavioural change projects, co-creation workshops and even as a Crisis Counsel for the modelling of rebound behaviours and attitudes.
The panel supports every part of our creative process, from strategy, to creative development to measurement and effectiveness. As the Disruption® Company, we’ve committed to an unconventional approach to cultural fluency that sets up truly distinct work.
“A year ago we made the decision to anchor our agency in one simple principle: empathy," said Mandy Leontakianakis, CSO at TBWA\Dublin. "We knew that a timeless value would be an anchor for both ethics and effectiveness, no matter what changed around us."
We were not to know, that the pressure on ‘empathy’ from private enterprise would escalate in the way it did, as a global pandemic would raise the volume on every kind of human crisis worldwide, seemingly overnight. Suddenly it was no longer ‘worthy’ to have discussions about sensitivity, as a boundary around the personal and professional was brought to its knees.
As brands are vigorously cancelled over their failure to keep pace, or lauded for their cultural astuteness and participation – an insistence on sensitive research has stood us in good stead. ‘Empathy’ in our context, is simply a commitment to breaking out of our own echo-chamber.
To dispensing with ‘fake’ anything – news, trends or assumptions and making the radical and uncannily simple decision to make sure we know what’s true.
Our first human-centred tool, 100 Voices, is a global panel of respondents, primed over months of engagement, to deliver articulate and honest responses to Design Thinking exercises.
We borrow the principles of empathy, ideation and iteration from Design Thinking, and are staffed unconventionally by open-minded thinkers in the behavioural and human sciences fields.
100Voices is a potent tool for positioning, allowing us to test competitor work for a realistic sense of distinct spaces, consumer sentiment beyond the focus group and its confirmation bias, and our own work in a fast, unique and scalable manner.
This tool enables pace and reach: recently pulling together 102 individual perspectives, in 37 markets, on a specific category from across the world in 48 hours. Our TBWA network helps us to widen that reach – as global perspectives inform local futures in a very real way.
We’ve been humbled, moved and informed by hundreds of conversations over the course of 2020 through Zoom groups, voicenotes and video submissions on the human experience of the pandemic. And have broached the nuances and implications of race, class and gender in countries where the issues are more disguised.
In addition, our panel helps us identify gaps in user and consumer journeys through a process called ‘Glitch Hunting’ so that as the world changes at the most practical of levels –we can pull Disruption® through to touchpoint and experience mapping with acuteness.
Things have changed, but one thing hasn’t: it is still our job to reflect reality so that our clients can connect. And this can’t happen in a vacuum.
Personal and collective denial has been challenged and when systems break, things get real.
In some ways, this call to conscience and accountability was always on its way, and if we take this opportunity to stop cordoning off human experience from institutional intent, as though those are different worlds, our organisations, our culture and our work, will be richer for it."
For more information visit 100 Voices.
