Of course, this all requires time and space to allow people to talk to each other and for brands to get involved in the conversation. We need time to build trust between people, and we need time to respond to and build on what people are saying. Crucially we need to accept that if consumers are going to become more equal partners in our approach to generating insight and innovation we need to build more continuous relationships with the people we are working with. This might mean spending two days working with consumers face to face or it can mean spending months or years working with particular communities of people. This is not about gathering a snapshot of opinion in a focus group or a hurriedly captured set of answers through a survey (as valuable as those methods remain), this is about working with people who are giving you the best of themselves, who move along the learning curve with you, who come to establish a relationship based on trust.

Probably the most significant principle that underpins our view of new ways of working with consumers is that interaction between people – whether consumers or brand owners – is absolutely vital. Fostering and participating in conversations between people is fundamental to the idea of co-creating insights and innovation. This is important in a number of different ways. Firstly it mirrors the way that we generally live as human beings – we are, after all, social animals. Secondly, it reflects the way we increasingly consume media and make decisions about what we buy, read, watch, and do. Thirdly it allows for a different kind of research landscape, one which subverts the traditional question and answer format – a relatively unfamiliar form of human communication and interaction – and replaces it with something far more natural and intuitive.

In this world consumers are encouraged to talk to each other rather than to researchers, opinions are offered, agreed with, disputed, challenged and developed. By working in a more natural communication mode we hear views expressed in real voices, and more importantly we end up discussing things and asking questions we didn’t even know existed or that we wanted to ask. This can lead to some “fortunate accidents” – insights that you have stumbled upon almost by chance. It is a reasonably good principle – though not always true – that if you know what question to ask you probably have a pretty good idea of what the answer is or might be. The mantra is simple: stop asking questions and start listening to conversations.