A Cultural Experiment in Bali: Grokking an “Off-Puttingly Weird” Religion in Two Weeks

As cultural and religious divisiveness grows, some insights for bridging the divide

How could anyone worship an anthropomorphized elephant? I wondered.

I’VE ALWAYS FOUND HINDUISM OFF-PUTTINGLY WEIRD. The pantheon of googly-eyed gods, blue gods with crazy arms, elephants and monkeys, all seemed so foreign. Years ago, a Hindu friend invited me to his ashram in California, thinking that Hinduism might appeal to me because “you’re the joyful type.” 

But nah. The chanting didn’t move me, the gods looked like the stuff of nightmares, and I was frankly creeped out by the guru lady with rolled-back eyes.

Knowing that there must be great value in a religion with 1.2 billion adherents, I asked Indian friends for help. Conceptually it was easy to grasp that Hindu gods represent different facets of one universal force. But despite my friends’ enthusiasm for the various deities they call upon in their daily lives, the conversation didn’t produce any emotional spark for me. I still didn’t get it.

Enter the crisis of cultural polarization that’s plaguing the United States.

As a Californian from a red state, I watch the progressive left and fundamentalist Christian right buy into shallow stereotypes and overt lies. We don’t give people the benefit of a doubt or explore why they believe what they do. Too often we see each other as fatally flawed instead of as normal people whose beliefs are influenced by widely varying backgrounds, experiences, and information bubbles.

So with an opportunity to spend two weeks on the Hindu-majority island of Bali, I decided this was my chance to get under the hood of Hinduism and perhaps even unlock insights for bridging cultural divides more generally. 

The goal was not to become Hindu, but to see Hinduism through the eyes of those who love it. I wanted to cultivate the empathy and respect that I see missing from the American debate.

Lasti performing her daily canang sari offerings in the family temple

My first morning in Bali, I awoke to find Lasti, the lady of the house, moving quietly around the garden making small offerings. In pouring rain, Lasti put offerings on altars in the family temple, a walled section of the garden with 18 shrines. She put offerings on statues, shrubs, in the kitchen, on the front sidewalk, in each room of the house, and on every scooter in the garage. 

Unhurried in a bright blue rain poncho, she placed a simple leaf, a small woven basket of flowers, a stick of incense, and a few grains of rice in each place; offerings called canang sari. Then she sprinkled holy water from a bowl holding aromatic flowers while praying intently in silence. She did this dozens of times in a compound holding some 25 structures.

On the second morning, Lasti allowed me to help, although non-family members may not perform the ritual itself. We picked frangipani flowers for the holy water, swept the temple, and Lasti made dozens of offerings with me in tow. I found it tedious by the end, but Lasti’s face was rapt for nearly one and a half hours. She seemed completely absorbed. Her expression reminded me of how I feel in a deep meditative state. 

That was the beginning of my breakthrough. Lasti’s devotion and spiritual depth moved my heart.

“Rather than hating on Shiva, he’s seen as necessary to the universal balance.”

My family attended church every Sunday when I was a kid, but our lives were secular. For many Balinese, Hinduism is integrated into the fabric of daily life (I can’t speak to Hinduism in other countries, like India). Most homes have a temple, whether as big as a back yard or as small as a shelf. Women like Lasti spend time, energy, and resources on rituals they believe benefit their household and beyond, maintaining the balance between positive and negative forces. Family members help support the ritual point person, forming a symbiosis of the spiritual and practical to keep everyone safe and well.

Balance is a foundational value in Hinduism that sparked my respect. Rather than angel-and-devil style bifurcation, there is recognition of positive and negative forces co-mingling in the world. The three primary deities – Brahma the creator, Vishnu the protector, and Shiva the destroyer – are all venerated. Rather than hating on Shiva, he’s seen as necessary to the universal balance. 

This is a much more realistic and compelling theology to me than everlasting hellfires for “the bad” and streets paved with gold for “the good.” (Although I left Christianity young, it remains a theological benchmark.)

Lasti described her basic prayer like this: “Thank you for your blessings. Here are flowers and rice for you. Please continue to bless us with health and prosperity.” The prayer varies according to the situation and role of the god being venerated. 

Ubiquitous black and white checked fabrics remind Balinese Hindus to maintain balance between positive and negative forces. Photo taken at the public temple where Koman is a priest.

Of the shrines in Lasti’s family temple, the three that receive the first offerings are the sun god, nature, and the family’s ancestors. Other gods represent different things such as learning, the cosmic order, and water. There’s even a small shrine in a back corner for protection of the busy intersection beyond the wall. 

As Lasti explained the role of each shrine, I began to understand how, together, they form an interlocking system that represents the whole of life. Without the sun, there would be nothing. Nature’s gifts flow in abundance. The ancestors worked hard and created the family. 

The daily offerings are in fact small moments of mindfulness for important things that people often take for granted. I started to see the Hindu gods not as freaky, grown-up muppets, but as a set of relatable metaphors that Hindus use to move through the world with more gratitude, mindfulness, and grace.

It blew my mind that the gods could be such powerful forces in peoples’ lives even when understood as metaphor. That’s a much easier swallow than Christian literalism around Ideas like hell being a real place or communion wafers turning into Christ’s body.

Suddenly I was not only vibing with Hinduism, I was deeply appreciating its elegance. My experiment was bearing fruit!

“‘In my opinion, Hinduism is a religion of feeling, and soul returning to oneself.’”

Hinduism is everywhere in Bali; in the art and architecture, theater and dance, and ubiquitous temples. Offering baskets bedeck driveways, tree branches, hiking paths. Black and white checked fabrics symbolize the balance of forces. Red, black, and white is a common color combination representing the Trimurti, or trio, of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma. These are everywhere — continual reminders to stay balanced and be grateful for your blessings.

Lasti’s brother Koman, a Hindu priest, and sister Kare helped me understand the gods as tools of emotional regulation. If a believer is upset, for example, they can call upon a god with positive energy as well as offering prayers to appease a god with negative energy. Personifying the emotions helps contain them, leaving them less able to hijack the mind. And although metaphorical, calling on a higher power still helps people feel less alone with their problems. Essentially, the gods struck me as a high-EQ tool for managing tough emotions. 

Said Koman, “In my opinion, Hinduism is a religion of feeling, and soul returning to oneself.”

Lasti performing the canang sari ritual in the family temple, part of a compound of about 25 shrines and buildings shared by several generations in Ubud, Bali.

Hindu concepts also influence Balinese social and economic policy, according to another of Lasti’s family members, a visual artist and gallerist named Ketut Paul who I happened to meet while gallery hopping. “Here if we have enough, we are satisfied,” Ketut said. “We don’t need more and more and more. This is why I don’t lock my door at night. I don’t worry about people stealing from me. Because we have balance.”

As I continued to marinate in Balinese Hinduism, my respect for it deepened and fondness started to grow. I watched the balance between good and evil play out in dramatic performances, I hiked a mountain where people had left hundreds of offerings to the mountain god, and I performed a powerful purification ritual in the sparkling pools of the Pura Tirta Empul water temple.

On the island of Java, after leaving Bali, I felt authentic delight at a statue of Ganesha, the elephant god who I’d always found bizarre. 

My guide at the famous Prambanan temple noted that Ganesha was holding the end of his own tusk because he had broken it off to write poetry – a pretty cool move IMO. Ganesha is associated with the arts and sciences, learning and literature, removing obstacles, and new beginnings. 

OMG, I would date this guy! 

Suddenly I’m really jibing with a Hindu god that less than three weeks earlier I had found completely freaky. That felt like confirmation that my mission had been fulfilled. Hinduism still isn’t my religion, but I have gained respect, admiration, and even fondness for it. 

So what’s the model for building cultural empathy? Here are four recommendations. 

1. Set the right goal

Trying to understand other belief systems doesn’t mean agreeing with them – or convincing their adherents that they are wrong. The goal is simply to try to understand where they’re coming from. Maybe in the end you disagree, but you’ve gained knowledge and, ideally, respect for a different way of thinking.

2. Be humble 

Assume that you don’t own the truth and there must be something reasonable behind the other side’s beliefs. Approach it as a conversation rather than a debate. A win might sound like this: “Thank you for explaining. I don’t see it that way, but I understand why you do.”

3. Get close

Cultivating cultural empathy often means seeing peoples’ expressions, hearing their voices, and watching their body language. Neurologically, we develop empathy by attuning to other peoples’ feelings, ideally in physical proximity. Kind of the opposite of a text fight or or leaving snarky comments on a social media post.

4. Learn the whole story

Belief systems come from interlocking pieces of culture: politics, education, the arts, spiritual teachings, media, community. The more facets you explore, the more you understand.

EPILOGUE

Later travels found me in a charismatic evangelical church service in North Sumatra. I figured I should give fundamentalist Christianity the same benefit of a doubt as Hinduism, despite negative past associations with it.

What I found were welcoming people singing their hearts out, and who were moved to both joy and tears over the course of the service. I used Google Lens to follow along with the service slides, which were written in Indonesian, and saw words that don’t appeal to me, like “unquenchable hellfires.” 

But you know what? These folks loved it. My skeptical brain was quiet, which was not true for earlier experiences with evangelicalism. 

Maybe it would have been different if I could have understood more. 

But I simply felt happy to be there, and happy for them.

A charismatic evangelical Christian service on Samosir Island, North Sumatra, Indonesia

How the Internet Conquered the Headhunters of Ifugao

90-year-old Guinid has watched life unfold in the jungle village of Batad since before World War II. Here he pounds rice at home in the Ifugao province of the Philippines.

A TWISTY, 12-HOUR BUS RIDE north of Manila lies Ifugao, a jungle state where indigenous people carved ingeniously engineered rice terraces into the mountainsides some 4,000 years ago. 

The same families farm the paddies today, using the practices they’ve always used: river-fed gravity irrigation, fertilizing only with chaff, and mortar-and-pestle de-husking. 

They still paint bulol harvest god figures with sacrificial chicken blood, praying for an abundant crop. Daily conversation is in Iyangan, the tribal language they have spoken for millennia. 

Until a few generations ago, the men of neighboring Ifugao villages warred with each other and collected the heads of their enemies. The warriors were fiercest in the village of Batad, according to Batad’s elder, a 90-year-old man named Guinid who has watched life there unfold since before World War II. 

Guinid, who sports a single tooth, a traditional red loin cloth, and a headdress decked with chartreuse flowers cut from a Mountain Dew bottle, sat for two conversations with me on a recent visit to Batad. Our translator was a young local man named Jerick, who spends his days guiding travelers around the village and running deliveries for neighbors when rice farming duties are light. 

Guinid recounted that an ancestor named Poon Yee once came back from a hunting trip with the head of a man from another village who he’d encountered in the forest. That night the people of Batad sacrificed a pig, danced, and drank rice wine in wild celebration. 

There was social pressure to collect only male heads; return with a woman’s and you would be labeled gay, Guinid noted. 

The warriors of Batad were not only able to fend off local rivals, they also outmaneuvered Japanese soldiers trying to take Ifugao in World War II. Guinid, born in 1935, was a boy at the time. “The Japanese thought they were very smart and they were,” he said. “But they didn’t know the mountains.” 

“Where war and even religion have failed to conquer, the Internet is driving a wedge.”

Neither the Spanish colonialists nor the U.S, which controlled the Philippines from 1898 to 1946, ever made inroads in Batad, said Guinid. 

Even an American Anglican priest who lived in Batad 1950-1960 and who translated the Bible into Iyangan got only so far. While the villagers did convert, they seem to treat Christianity as a “both/and” proposition with their traditional animist beliefs. 

“There is still lightning, still the mountains,” that deserve respect and recognition, observed Jerick, 27. 

Today, a handful of households in Batad host visitors via Airbnb while others sell food, carvings, and woven goods to travelers. Many speak Tagalog and some speak English. But they still refuse to allow a driveable road into the village, which remains accessible only by a steep walking path. 

So far Batad seems to be maintaining the tight bonds of a small, interdependent collective. Villagers share fruits and vegetables from their gardens, look after each others’ elderly and young, and freely use each others’ front terraces as walking paths around the mountain. 

But sadly, where war and even religion have failed to conquer, the Internet is driving a wedge. 

Jerick told me that when he was a child, he and his friends spent school holidays foraging for fruit and building swimming holes in the streams. 

Now the children are on their parents’ phones from a young age, watching videos and playing games. Like a lot of kids in the U.S. and elsewhere, they don’t play as much outside and they don’t want to help their parents with the rice, said Jerick. Batad kids’ connections to tradition, nature, and their community are being supplanted by addictive content from oceans away. 

“Phone-addicted kids can be real assholes – whether in Oakland, California or rural Ifugao.”

I heard the same thing the next place I visited, the town of Sagada, known for its hanging coffins, limestone caves, and handicrafts. My homestay host, Myrlie, who hails from a separate Ifugao tribe, was constantly on top of her 11-year-old son to get off his phone and help her clean. “He always says ‘later,’” she complained. “But by then it’s done.” 

This was painfully familiar to me from my son’s childhood in Oakland, CA. He was born in 2005, two years before the introduction of the iPhone, and was therefore an early guinea pig of the “smart phone generation.” 

I tried to warn Myrlie that my son and other kids from his cohort now regret winning the phone argument when they were young. Today they know their brains are the worse for it. “You’re the only one who can make your son stop,” I warned. “It’s up to you to set limits.” When she agreed, her son poked her in the ribs and ran off with his phone. 

Phone-addicted kids can be real assholes – whether in Oakland, California or rural Ifugao. 

“In the thronged metropolis of Manila, AI is all the rage.”

Phone addiction was the hot topic at Sagada’s Mt. Carmel Catholic Church, where I decided to take in some local religious culture the Sunday I was in town. The Ten Commandments are hand-painted on a sign in front of the church, which proclaims this Number One: “Thou shalt have no strange gods before me.” 

Alternating between English and Tagalog, the priest sermonized that “In reality, God is the center of the world. But on Facebook, YOU are the center of the world.” He criticized Facebook for preying upon peoples’ inherent ego-centrism and creating disconnection among Filipino families. 

Meantime a pink-clad toddler ran around the sanctuary with a smart phone in her hands. 

Four hundred kilometers south, in the thronged metropolis of Manila, AI is all the rage. A friend who lives there told me that many people in his circle have formed what they consider deep friendships with ChatGPT. They confide in the chatbot and take its advice without much pause. “They say it knows them better than anyone,” my friend said. “They aren’t suspicious people. They discuss ‘what ChatGPT said’ as if it’s their therapist or their wisest friend.“ 

So good luck to them, to us, to every parent and child. And to societies who draw their strength from an engaged, thoughtful, connected citizenry. In every corner of the world, humanity is firmly in the thrall of addictive pixels – the strangest god of all. 

Jerick — farmer, guide, translator, and delivery runner — overlooking the rice terraces of Batad

Reaching Escape Velocity

Guinid, a 90-year-old man in the Philippines rain forest, pounds rice every day in a mortar he carved from river stone. He told me stories of the Japanese invasion, his family’s history as head hunters, and his conversion to Christianity.

I HAD AN EPIPHANAL MOMENT at age 18 watching my Danish host father, Helge, look lovingly into the eyes of his wife, Karin, and call her “skat”. Skat means “darling” in Danish, but I was more familiar with the English “scat,” aka wild animal poop. 

A tremor went through my young system at the cognitive dissonance: the deeply universal humanness of romantic love expressed through a cultural overlay so random that it can turn darling to poop and poop to darling. 

Of course everyone knows, as I knew, that languages and cultures are different. But I grokked it on a deeper level that day. The tremor I felt was a realigning of my pixels, a loosening of the neurological patterns that defined my world. And the unlocking of a more dimensional way of understanding people and the complicated intermediating networks we construct – communities, organizations, businesses, societies, nations. 

“The big red arrows of the universe are pointing me towards change.”

My professional life has been devoted to understanding human and organizational behavior, first as a journalist and then as an insight-based marketing strategist. Now, with the big red arrows of the universe pointing me toward change, I’ve decided to spend six months traveling: to learn, to grow, to pattern crack.

The gravitational pull of the Bay Area has loosened its hold on me. My son is settled at college and we’re downsizing our homested. The tech industry where I make my living is working through a period of creative destruction, to put it mildly. 

The democracy where I make my life is going through a different kind of destruction. I’m okay watching that from afar, for now, and instead of worrying about it at home, committing myself to observing how other societies operate and what lessons we might take from them.

Perhaps the biggest gravity-lightener is achieving the milestone age of 60. This is supposed to be the year when the Great Calcification takes hold – right? Yet I feel amazing – more like I am blooming than aging. 

My body strong and flexible, thanks to a power yoga addiction. And then there’s the age = wisdom thing. Through many years of Buddhist practice, I’ve been working to plant seeds of empathy and understanding. At age 60, it seems they might be bearing quality fruit. I could be deluding myself – one does not know. But I feel less reactive, more grounded, more forgiving, and on top of things.

In any event, escape velocity achieved, I have officially launched my six-month adventure. 

In July, I spent two weeks in Hawaii and two weeks in Japan with my son. He returned to his second year of college in San Francisco while I continued on to the Philippines, which I’ll write about in my next post. For the next two weeks I’ll explore the wildlife and indigenous peoples of Borneo. And then on to Indonesia, Western Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, where I’ll spend 30 days at a Buddhist monastery on a silent insight meditation retreat.

In late January, I plan to return to the Bay Area, renewed and refreshed with what I hope will be a ginormous realignment of brain pixels. 

I’ll be posting as I go. Take care and stay tuned.

Silicon Valley, Disrupt Thyself

Two founders of a stealth startup reached out to me on LinkedIn recently asking for 30 minutes to provide feedback on their idea. They were struggling with product market fit and seeking perspective from seasoned marketers.

In chatting with them, I was impressed with three things: 

• Unlike many entrepreneurs who wait to test their assumptions, these founders were doing research before they spent a lot of their investors’ money

• They were responsive and grateful for my detailed critique

• They had no idea what they were doing

Essentially these entrepreneurs were trying to solve a problem — with AI, of course — that didn’t exist in the first place. Their web widget I believe, and they came to agree, would have made webpage navigation more confusing instead of less.

“They lacked even a glimmer of a minimum viable product.”

The burning question is this: How did they get funded? Apart from possessing Silicon Valley’s preferred gender, skin tone, and elite educational credentials, it was hard to see how this duo had attracted dollars from its nameplate investors. 

They were smart and earnest young fellows, but they lacked even the glimmer of a minimum viable product. More worrisome is that they didn’t seem to have the capacity to even imagine what might be useful to an average human visiting a website, which any of 8 billion marketers on Earth (made-up number) could easily take an educated guess at.

VCs expect to make money on roughly one out of 10 investments (NOT a made-up number), and I’ll bet this helps explain why the success rate is so low: Very few VCs have marketing expertise so they discount its value. A natural result is misplaced bets and unrealized business potential.

Anecdotally, I find that many – although certainly not all – in the Valley think of marketing as a thin veneer of words and design, slapped on the product as it ships. In fact, marketing gives the customer a seat at the table during product design, helping tune both product and messaging to customer needs and delivering creative assets only in later stages. 

In a nutshell, marketing is only as important as your customer.

Okay! Time for audience questions. 

1. “But don’t the engineers need to get the product right before we talk to prospects?”

Of course you need to be certain that the product is viable. But who’s to say what the “right” product is if not the folks who will use it? 

2. “How can we do research when we didn’t build time or budget into our plan?”

First off, you should have – and your VCs / board should have helped you with that. 

Secondly, with market research, you can get prospects’ feedback at the concept stage – before developing a product with low market potential. You might need to pivot, but you’ll be pivoting much faster — increasing your likelihood of being among the 10 percent of startups who make it. This is especially true given that basic research can be ridiculously quick and affordable.

“Silicon Valley’s overall success doesn’t mean it ain’t broke.”

Another anecdote: I recently worked with a serial entrepreneur who wanted my help repositioning his company due to a misfire on the target audience. 

He’d burned through most of his Series A funds developing a product based on what seemed like strong market potential. Very late in the game, he learned that the audience his product was designed to help had no purchase authority and that the people who controlled the purse strings had zero interest in supporting the first group.

So he was spending his last A-round pennies retooling towards this new audience although a quick round of market research one year earlier could have saved him all of that struggle.

This man is a highly educated, very successful entrepreneur and investor who has been in the business for decades. When I mentioned that, for his other startups, we could conduct research earlier in the process to identify the key purchase dynamics, he waved off the idea.

This is how the Valley does business all too often: Investing huge amounts of time doing things they’re comfortable doing while claiming there isn’t time or money to talk to the customer prospects who are ultimately going to make or break their success.

Maybe this complaint seems silly given the Valley’s status is a history-defining powerhouse of innovation and capital generation. I have all the respect in the world for that (and for its impact on my property values – thanks!) But at the same time, that doesn’t mean it ain’t broke. 

This is capitalism with a literal capital C leaving money and efficiency on the table simply because it’s used to doing things a certain way. Venture is thrilled to disrupt other industries, but the benign tweak that I’m suggesting seems too “risky” for most. Of course, VCs’ management fees blunt the impact of unsuccessful portfolio companies. But the startups themselves enjoy no such cushion.

Silicon Valley, here’s an idea worth funding: Disrupt thyself. #sos #sendmarketing

Challenger brand case study: Reverse engineering the Harris-Walz creative brief

I used to cover presidential campaigns as a political reporter. Today I look at them through the lens of a strategic marketer.

What I’m seeing is a challenger brand, Harris-Walz, that is truly nailing its campaign strategy: Developing a fresh narrative and tone, harnessing cultural tailwinds, rapidly prototyping messaging, and using insight to find its way into the audience’s consideration set despite an entrenched competitor.

Whether it ultimately works remains to be seen. The election is weeks away, honeymoons end, and Republicans have an electoral college advantage. It’s worth noting that while the Democratic National Convention averaged 3 million more viewers over four nights than the Republican National Convention (21.8 million v. 18.9 million), Donald Trump retained a lead in most swing states even in the heady days following the DNC, according to realclearpolling.com. 

So Harris-Walz is still the underdog. But underdog brands have the opportunity to excite and inspire their audience with a fresh story, which is harder for an entrenched brand. Just ask Joe Biden. And Donald “They stole the election four years ago” Trump.

In the wake of last week’s Democratic convention, here’s a thought exercise imagining the creative brief for the Harris/Walz challenger brand campaign and, in the table below, key ways the campaign team has delivered so far. 

HARRIS-WALZ PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN CREATIVE BRIEF

Summer 2024

ASSIGNMENT

Develop a visionary Challenger Brand Strategy to reverse the Democratic slide and put Harri-Walz in the White House.

OBJECTIVES

• Persuade middle class moderates and swing voters to support Harris/Walz

• Overcome Democratic voters’ enthusiasm gap. Excite them to feel great, donate, vote, volunteer, and advocate

AUDIENCE

Moderates and swing voters aren’t choosing Trump’s negativity as much as it’s been a dominant narrative that has come to feel inevitable. It grows stronger by feeding on itself with no compelling alternative. Democrats are frustrated by their side’s lack of vision and vigor. The erosion of personal freedoms and macroeconomic forces feed feelings of middle class hopelessness. Trumpism’s dark narrative has started to feel inescapable – even normal.

INSIGHT

People aren’t mired in fear and negativity because they want to be. There’s a latent appetite for a different kind of story: an inspiring, positive vision that can invigorate people and help them feel part of something bigger.

MAIN MESSAGE

“Together let’s build a bright future of joy, freedom, and unity.”

PILLAR MESSAGES

Joy, Freedom, “Do something”

TONE

Joyful, Self-assured, Spicy

HOW THE CAMPAIGN IS DELIVERING ON ITS STRATEGY

How talking to just 12 “real people” opened up a universe of business opportunity

Of the eight months I recently spent crafting brand strategy for a consumer technology client, two days stand out as by far the most valuable: the days I interviewed “real people” – gen pop tech users.

Just 12 interviews with U.S. homeowners yielded revelatory insights that moved the messaging from good to great. While surveys had told us what people know they want from their home technology, actually speaking with them unearthed a value proposition that would surprise and delight them. 

It’s easy to under-estimate the importance of qualitative research because the results aren’t statistically significant; quant is an easier sell to the cerebrum. And quant is critically important as a baseline. But the difference between echoing what quant will tell you audiences want – versus providing them with unexpected and exciting messages based on insights from real conversations – can be the difference between white noise and category leadership. 

While popular culture tends to diss qualitative research (“focus groups are rigged”) asking your audience about their challenges and preferences is very much an act of respect. And when your company’s communications are interesting and useful, the value flows back to your brand.

“Note to cerebrum: statistics aren’t the point of qual.”

An investment of less than $3K for our recent recruit yielded 12 hours of great video conversations and, ultimately, a unique positioning that simply wasn't foreseeable from within the four walls of the marketing department.

Maybe that’s surprising given that we spoke to only 12 homeowners out of more than 100 million wifi-using households in the U.S. That’s statistically as unreliable as you can get. But, note to cerebrum: Statistics aren’t the point of qual. 

If your cerebrum is standing between you and connecting in this way with your audiences, here some data points that can help resolve the cognitive dissonance:

1. The alternative to talking to a small sample of people is talking to none. Yes, per the above, you can and should survey your audience for a baseline understanding. But to explore ideas and connect the dots between your offering and peoples’ actual lives requires real human interaction. To understand how people think and feel, you need to hear their voices and see their faces. So it’s important to talk to people – and twelve is a lot more than zero.

2. A well-crafted recruit will ensure you’re pinpointing relevant folks. Your screener should reflect the bullseye of your target audience on filters like household income, purchase stage, and product usage. On criteria that don’t directly relate, it’s best to find a well-rounded mix. Recruits should also pass an articulation test so it’s clear they can communicate well.

3. Consistency is reliable. People have very different opinions on topics like, say, who should be president. But on many topics – say, the family refrigerator, or the benefits of working from home – the spread will be narrower. The learnings are in the patterns that emerge. If no clear patterns emerge, you may need to narrow the parameters of your recruit or you may have introduced a topic people don’t know or care much about. Which may turn out to be the answer to your question.

4. You can, and should, replace any duds. If an interviewee isn’t providing sufficient answers, you can end the interview with a thanks and have them replaced. I discovered recently that one interviewee wasn’t actually in the market for the product we were discussing – she had lied on the screener. I ended the interview, told the recruiter, and they ate the cost. They also removed her from their database. It’s on your recruiter to find useful subjects that don’t waste your time and money.

Face-to-face research is one thing I’ve never regretted in nearly 20 years as a creative and brand strategist. This is a perfect time for all good cerebrums to get in line!