Why This?
The highly-regulated world of pharmaceutical market research makes it easy to lose sight of best practices.
In the flood-tide of information that insights professionals have to contend with daily, very basic (but sometimes critical) ideas can get lost or ignored. Incidental Findings: An Inside View of Market Research is your very own field guide to forgotten core principles, novel ways of approaching perennial issues, and tactics for maximizing
the value of the market research data you collect.
Lasting Insights, Bite-Size Pieces
Every Incidental Findings post comes to you on three levels:
Essence (the TLDR, five-second version)
Elevator Pitch (the one-minute version)
Expansion (the fuller story, with examples)
This way, you can “sample” each post before you dive deeper.
What I expect you to find is that the issues that crop up in my work have tentacles that reach into other disciplines—and into life in general. Measuring the gap between what a person says and what that person actually does, for example. Or finding ideas that hover above what people say, rather than taking people literally at their word.
At different points I will talk about language, psychology, self-image, denial, hope, fear, disappointment, generosity, confusion, and even delight. There may be some amusement, intentional or not. And some one-of-a-kind illustrations.
My specialty is qualitative research, but my interest is in leveraging human behavior to produce deep insights. I believe it is possible to be deadly serious about research and also have a sense of humor.
Why Me? And Why You?
I have been an insights professional for over a quarter century, and the co-founder of a market research consultancy for ten years. I have worked on over 150 primary market research projects in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology space in global markets.
Credentials? I have no meaningful medical training and no advanced degrees in any field that might be considered germane to the topics above. What I do have to offer is a unique way of understanding. I hope that it provides you with some tools to get more from market research and to notice more in the everyday world.
