Blogs

How do you decide what to focus your innovation efforts on as a business? Do you receive most of your input from syndicated research, news articles in the popular press and trade publications? You likely also visit trade shows and conferences, exploring the latest innovations in fields directly and indirectly related to yours? While all […]

If you want your clients or the company you work for to truly embrace diversity, then you need to think about re-examining commonly used approaches to research. After all, research is what drives the creation of solutions and value in the marketplace. If research doesn’t take the rich complexity of culture into account, then it […]

Why Meaning Matters is a weekly podcast series that explores how meaning shapes our experience and sets our expectations. When meanings shift, our economic, political and cultural landscape shifts along with it.

There are three common ways organizations leverage our capabilities to drive anthropological thinking through the organization in an agile and scalable manner. Most companies tend to bring us in with one of these use-cases in mind. Over time, as they discover the breath and depth of our capabilities, our impact tends to expand and our […]

According to Whole Foods, the year 2020 will see the rise of syrups made from monk fruit, pomegranates, coconut or dates. The reason? These are solutions that can replace sweeteners made from typical sugars, stevia, honey and maple syrup. But as consumer insight teams, R&D teams and marketing professionals consider how this will impact their […]

Symbolic capital, tension, and tempo — the three tenets of understanding the why behind human behavior. Summary: There’s no other methodology that enables the identification symbolic capital (an intangible resource that grants one power, prestige, privilege etc.), the understanding of the tensions between different forms of symbolic capital, and the calculation of tempo (rate of […]

In every microculture, consumers have requirements that must be met in order for a product to be considered a ‘real’ solution. The field of phenomenology [the study of structures of experience and consciousness] distinguishes itself from the field of psychology by asking one really important question — What conditions must something satisfy in order to count as […]

Let’s face it, the modern foresight practice is a bit of a mess. But more on that later. Almost every major corporation is investing in foresight these days, which is of course a development that truly deserves celebration. If we rewind the clock just five years, we’d find that Foresight was barely talked about except […]

Unlike most social data analysis tools that focus on finding patterns in consumer comments and engagements that directly mention a search term, MotivBase understands that to truly decode culture (and conduct an immersive ethnography), it needs to go beyond direct mentions to understand the universe of topics or meanings surrounding a search term (discussed by […]