What does meditation have to do with market research?

I spent last week in rural Northern Colorado on a Buddhist meditation retreat where I and 10 others spent something like 7-8 hours a day doing sitting meditation, walking meditation, and a new-to-me practice called 'aimless wandering.' (It was just like it sounds--walking around with no strategy, goal, or destination. Much harder than I thought it would be.)

Now sitting here a week later with my mind nearly as busy as ever, I'm reflecting on how that experience might have informed the way I think about business and research-informed decision-making.

Getting beyond discursive thoughts to other forms of knowing.

I think it's a misnomer that meditation is designed to get rid of our thoughts. The brain creates discursive thoughts naturally. That said, I did find that after several days of meditation, I had a different relationship with my discursive thoughts. They were overall more settled, like the flakes in a snow globe settling after they are shaken up. And with the busy mind more settled, I had greater access to a sense of clarity about my own experience. Less clouded by judgments, stories, and irritation. And WAY more genuine empathy to and openness to others.

So what connections can I make to market research? Well, it seems to me that most market research techniques, interviews and surveys, access the discursive mind. (User research techniques are seen to access more behavioral data through observations, ethnography, but I believe this is a subset of market research and not a separate discipline.) In our 15-minute surveys (that are really 20-25 minutes :)) we ask about perceptions, opinions, judgements, etc. I don't know if that's a bad thing per se. Afterall, our monkey mind is at play when we make decisions about which events we go to, which products we buy, etc. If I were a brand leader, I'd want to know my audience's discursive thoughts about my offering--it's not like it's irrelevant. But oftentimes they are ex post facto rationalizations after our more emotional minds have made quick judgments.

Indeed, research shows that emotion, in addition to cognition, plays a central role in decision-making. Emotion appears to play a critical role particularly in situations of ambiguity or uncertainty. Some of the projective interviewing techniques that seemed more in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s (before behavioral economics came onto the scene, perhaps?) can still play an important role in accessing gut reactions and subtle preferences and aversions. Projective techniques, like archetype or image associations or story construction, may be especially useful in understanding how consumers or audiences make decisions in times of high ambiguity. They can unearth the subtle ways we are drawn toward or repelled away from someone or something, processes we may not even be able to articulate to ourselves.

Maybe we should do a better job of incorporating these into our studies and talking to clients about what they do. Too many times I think clients seem them as 'entertaining' activities for participants and not legitimate techniques. I would bet, though, that if we analyze our own experience when it comes to our consumer preferences and behaviors, we observe a way that we are pulled toward and away from things at a fundamental level that comes before our stories about why we choose to buy one coffee brand over another at Whole Foods. Projective techniques can get us closer to noticing and therefore understanding that push and pull.

Non-verbal forms of communication are full of meaning.

The meditation retreat was mostly silent. We reserved talking only for necessary communication ('pass me the salt') and passed notes for other purposes. Yet, communication of some sort was still ongoing. There were things I learned about my fellow retreatants that I gleaned only through being in the same space with them--how they walk or move, their sense of humor, sense of style, their energy, for lack of a more academic term. Restricting some forms of communication (verbal) meant that these other methods of communication were that much more potent and easier for me to receive and understand.

I generally think there is too much talking in many of the qual interviews I've conducted and observed. Lots of talking helps cover up the awkwardness between two strangers, so it has a role. RIVA training suggests that, after the instructions and rapport-building have occurred, the moderator shows speak only 20% of the time, and the participant should talk the remaining 80% of the time. Yet, we've all seen discussion guides of literally 40 questions that essentially become rapid-fire surveys. Don't get me started on the yes/no questions (or worse, "doctor, what percentage of your patient population meets x or y criteria?").

What are opportunities to allow for more of the non-verbal communication we engage in all the time as humans? Certainly observational studies, ethnographies. But perhaps activities that can be included in the run-of-the-mill in-depth interview: collage constructions, drawing exercises, or even some role playing exercises derived from theater. I admittedly don't know much about this area of projective techniques and would love to learn more. If you have any source recommendations, please send.

If we as researchers want to help make the world a better place--with programs, products and services that actually help people instead of further enshittify (to borrow the "enshittification" concept developed by Cory Doctorow) our culture + economy--perhaps we could turn more toward inviting participants to share their full human selves in all the different ways of knowing we possess. Ways of knowing that can only really be held by and interpreted by fellow embodied humans who have the capacity to make meaning out of, not only linguistic information (not just parrot the most statistically likely associations), but also out of behavior, non-verbal expression, impulses, and deeper forms of knowing.