Thirty insights from thirty years in qualitative research

It’s also 30 years since I moderated my first focus group and I thought it would be fun to step back in time and share some memories, observations, insights from everyone’s favourite decade. 30 years. 30 insights.

Whether you remember it first time around or are simply 90s-curious, let’s fire up the flux capacitor, jump into the DeLorean and go back to the future of 1995.

When I moderated my first focus groups back in the 90s we used to refer to ‘housewives’ all the time. FMCG briefs still described their target market as housewives, immediately conjuring up a picture of a downtrodden woman in a pinny straight out of the 50s.

Most women I spoke to who were at home with their children and didn’t have a job would still refer to themselves in group introductions as housewives. Because this was 1995 and not 1955 many were embarrassed, ‘just a housewife’, and clearly often felt they should be doing something more glamorous and aspirational. Some brazened it out, but few could use that word to describe themselves completely neutrally.

Self-deprecation was often reinforced by the side glances of the working mums sitting next to them in the group who viewed themselves as superior. So much so that we often split our samples by working and non-working women to avoid that tension.

This was a full five years before Nigella transformed the housewife into the Domestic Goddess (becoming single-handedly responsible for the cupcake boom) and 23 years before Mrs Hinch had racked up 1 million followers by reframing cleaning the loo as therapy.

In 2025 the rigid definitions of ‘full-time’, ‘part-time’ and ‘non-working’ have been blurred by technology, more flexible working patterns and extended maternity leave (never referred to as ‘mat leave’ in the 90s). Now mothers of young children introduce themselves in focus groups as ‘a stay at home mum’ or ‘at home with the kids’, with a side hustle on Vinted or Etsy.

There’s less judgment, less disapproval, and a ready acceptance that some people just love to clean their kitchens.

But for all but the wealthiest families, it’s not necessarily any easier.

In the ’90s many mothers with young children were choosing whether to work outside the home or not, and then facing the judgement of their peers over whatever choice they made. In 2025 the cost of living crisis means they are working because they need the money or staying at home because they can’t afford the childcare.

In 30 years the housewife has completely disappeared from the lexicon, but her role and responsibilities have been re-imagined and re-interpreted on Instagram as cleanfluencers, declutterers, food influencers and even tradwives for all those ‘at home with the kids’ to scroll through.

2: Whatever happened to social class? (SOCIAL CLASS)

Back in 1995 as a rookie researcher one of the things I had to learn was the meaning of the mysterious letters of the NRS socio-economic classification system that proceeded logically from A to E but with the letter C inexplicably split into C1 and C2 (if anyone knows why, please let me know, it’s been bugging me for years) and into which every person could be slotted by dint of the occupation of their head of household.

I was told how important it was not to mix Bs and Ds in the same focus group (they would never get on, I was informed, one would be inhibited by the presence of the other, how could you have a solicitor and a bus driver in the same group?) You were told you could just about get by with C1C2D, but that was a bit of a stretch.

Our qual recruiters were often still recruiting in the street and would set off to large detached houses to find Bs and council estates for Ds. They would make swift, instinctive judgements based on accent and clothing – group cohesion was everything – you couldn’t have one person in a suit with someone else wearing overalls.

In 2025 thank goodness it feels very different. People speak more similarly and dress more similarly. You can’t tell what people do by the clothes they wear – everyone comes to a group in sports leisure.

We live in a world where PhD students (who in the past would almost certainly have ended up in an AB occupation) are working as baristas (social class D). Plumbers (social class C2) could easily be earning more than double what a trainee barrister makes (social class A). My 1995 researcher mind would have been blown, not least by not knowing what a barista is.

2025 isn’t a world without class, and it certainly is a world where money counts for more. You might not feel inhibited by the presence of the guy in the suit but still feel awkward when it becomes clear how big his house is compared with yours. There are plenty of other factors with the potential to impede group cohesion but from where I sit now the rigid class definitions of 1995 feel a world away.

Right the way through the 90s the BBC ran a sitcom called 2.4 children – so-called because 2.4 children was the average number of kids in a family. The joke being that the perfectly ordinary family were not ordinary at all because of all the bizarre and extreme things that kept happening to them.

A family with two children did not seem odd in the 1990s and it still doesn’t seem odd 30 years on. In fact the ONS shows us that the share of families with two dependent children has remained constant at 41% over that 30 years but the proportion of one child families has been steadily increasing and the proportion of 3+ child families has been decreasing. As of 2023 14% of families comprised 3 or more children, down from 17% in 1996.

That has certainly chimed with my 30 years of experience of chatting to people about their families. One-two children feels the norm now, rather than two-three then and anything above 3 is seen as almost freakish – you can see the surprise and near-shock on people’s faces when a parent cheerfully informs the other parents around them they have 4 children.

It’s not just that families are getting smaller, it’s clear that parents are devoting much more time and resource and energy to each child they have. Less means more.

Parents are throwing themselves much more into family activities at the weekends than they ever used to: multiple trips, outings, birthday parties, experiences and greater pressure from social media to document them all.

Of course it’s in people’s interests to depict themselves as selfless and devoted parents in front of others – they may well be enjoying a lot more me time than they let on, but the fact they feel this is how they should be talking about how they parent is an insight in itself.

And, yes, in 2025 ‘parent’ is a verb. That’s a change from 1995 too.

Hubby, the missus, other half, wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, fiancé, or partner – what word do you use to describe the person you live with as a couple?

Right now in 2025 if you’re not married it’s almost certainly partner.

But back in 1995 people struggled. Our sample specs referred to ‘married/co-habiting’ but no-one would ever use the word ‘co-habit’ in ordinary conversation.

The default word boyfriend/girlfriend seemed all wrong for couples over about 25 who were living together. I saw people in focus groups hesitate over what word to use all the time. It seemed ridiculous given co-habiting was becoming an increasingly common phenomenon.

In 1995 the proportion of couples who co-habited rather than were married was around 6%, interestingly about the same as it had been in 1985. But by 2005 it had doubled and by 2015 it was up to about 18%.

The word we all use now is partner, but back in 1995 that was always used in a business context, or for gay couples, and as civil partnerships were still 10 years off not many of our respondents would be that open.

By 2025 it’s flipped and now it’s assumed that ‘partner’ is personal and it’s in business where you need a qualifier to avoid embarrassing misunderstandings. As someone who has been in a business partnership with three men I know how crucial that qualifier is!

In thirty years everything has been simplified, we have the word we need, no hesitations. I can vividly remember, soon after the legalisation of gay marriage, the first time that I heard a man in a group introducing himself as living with his husband and feeling that, twenty years after I started, the world had become a much better place.

Did we really? Oh yes we did.

Back in 1995 when you could smoke everywhere, it was par for the course for there to be someone to light up in focus groups, although it was considered rude not to ask first. Smokers were always tense and jittery before they were able to take their first drag and once they had relaxed they were much more open and chatty.

I don’t remember anyone else saying that they did object when asked permission – but I’m sure there were many who were too polite to say. It sounds intolerable now, but there was just a lot more smokers then. In 1995 26% of adults smoked.

Pubs were full of it, cigarettes were advertised and 16 year olds could legally buy cigarettes.

However, if you thought it was tough for non-smokers in focus groups thirty years ago, spare a thought for my moderator counterpart 10 years earlier in 1985 who would have been coughing and wheezing in a world where 45% of adults smoked, although, quite staggeringly, where cigarette ads on TV had been banned since 1965 (other forms of advertising were not banned until almost 40 years later in 2003).

As the number of non-smoking areas in public places like restaurants grew ‘Does anyone mind if I smoke?’ became ‘Can you smoke in here?’. It was harder to manage those respondents in a focus group who would now be nipping out for a cheeky fag rather than smoking in the group.

And then finally in 2007 came the smoking ban (2006 for Scotland) and the issue disappeared in a last puff of smoke. No more ash-trays, no more acrid smells, no more overpowering Febreze acting as cover-up.

I had worked on many tobacco control projects before the ban and knew the Department of Health was worried that this would be a law that would constantly be flouted. But no, everyone accepted it (bar perhaps a certain Nigel Farage) the smokers went outside and there were virtually no prosecutions for lighting up in a public place.

Back in 1995 however smoking was not the only disruption in the group.

‘I was looking for some action but all I found was cigarettes and alcohol’. I don’t know if Noel found much action but certainly in the focus group of 1995 he’d have found alcohol as well as the ciggies.

It feels completely inappropriate now but we saw ourselves almost as being in the hospitality business – you came to a group and you got sandwiches, crisps, peanuts and your choice of beer or wine in exchange for your opinions.

If I say we offered people a drink to help them relax it sounds worse than inappropriate, it sounds positively creepy but that was genuinely what we were thinking. My first boss told me that a focus group discussion should feel like a chat in the pub and It feels entirely typical of Britain in the 90s that all social interactions should aspire to the status of the pub. We were still three years off the arrival of Starbucks in the UK – alcohol reigned supreme.

It was very much a gendered approach, beer for the men, ‘white wine for the ladies’. It wasn’t as if we intended it that way, everyone had the choice but they all seem to conform to the stereotype. Despite the 90s being the age of the ladette drinking pints our ladettes seemed much more keen on a glass of wine. Or two. Or three.

It was perfectly possible and indeed perfectly predictable that people would get quite drunk, particularly if the open bottle of wine were left on the table. It was part of the moderator skill set to be able to offer a welcoming drink at the start of the group and then deflect requests for a top-up as the group went on.

Not always successfully. Stories abound of hapless moderators having to eject drunken respondents from the group and several researchers have told me of people nodding off in their sessions (although who’s to say that was the alcohol?)

There was no equivalent of the cigarette ban – sometime around 2005 it seemed to occur to all of us that it would be a lot easier to rely on our social skills to get the group relaxed and chatty than to delegate this function to the alcohol. Viewing studios began to ask us if we wanted to serve alcohol or not, rather than assume that we did.

One time I remember laying out the soft drinks and the bottles of water, envisaging a quieter but more businesslike atmosphere for my group, but finding instead that as the respondents entered the room two women rushed to the back, opened one of the cupboards and shouted out, ’this is where they keep the wine.’

After that I always asked the studio to clear the cupboards completely. Noel would have been very disappointed.

When I started off as a moderator it was impressed on us with great solemnity was that we should never ever overlook ‘The Warm-up’. No sports coach or physio could have been stricter on stretches before exercise than my old boss on warm-ups.

Back in the day, if we to start a group without a proper warm-up who knew what terrible things would happen – if no relaxed, chatty atmosphere was established, no respondents would speak in more than monosyllables and worst of all there would be NO insights. Even if your train was delayed and you arrived at the group late it was drummed into you that you could in no way skip the warm-up. The warm-up was not simply a round of introductions. It also comprised a topic related to the subject matter of the group, but easy and fun to talk about (eg bad hair days for haircare products).

As each respondent went round the room introducing themselves we would as moderators respond with brief remarks to build rapport, ‘3 month old baby, hope you’re getting some sleep’, ‘6 dogs, that must take a lot of walking’. Sometimes I would shake it up a bit by asking people what they were doing this time yesterday, usually ‘coming back from work’, ‘in the gym’, ‘making the kids’ tea’, but once I did get ‘giving birth’ and another time ‘having sex with my boyfriend’ at which point that group was definitely warmed up and ready to go.

We all struggled with names, despite everyone telling the group their name as they introduced themselves no-one ever (and they still don’t) remembered names (‘as that lady said…sorry forgotten your name’). Now it is much more common in a viewing studio for respondents to be given name labels and in the posher ones to have place-cards, UN style.

Now with the bulk of groups online, everyone can see everyone’s name in the corner of the screen, and the warm-ups are shorter. You don’t need to warm up an online group because the group does not exist in the same way as it does in person. Online everyone feels safe in their own square and often more relaxed from the start than they would be coming into a studio.

In a way that’s great, and you really don’t want to force it, if the group is ready to go it’s ready to go, but being more relaxed doesn’t necessarily mean being more engaged. The temptation to check your phone or get distracted is much greater in an online session and you don’t get people sparking off each other in the way you do IRL.

Back in the day everyone was present and in the moment, it’s 1995 remember, no (well, hardly any) phones, no Zoom, no other place you could be and consequently the warm-up was much more important. Respondents started off feeling more exposed and uncertain, and consequently the moderator had to work harder to bring them in. Only when everyone felt relaxed and was laughing was the group ready to go.

This is probably not the post you are expecting it to be. If we’re going to be talking about phones in a social context, comparing 1995 to 2025, you are probably expecting a lament about the good old days when everyone in a focus group was fully engaged (or getting drunk, see Post No 6 Beer or wine) and compare it with 2025 when no-one can tear themselves away from their screens for a moment.

But I’m not. 2025 is better than you might think.

In 1995 phones were just moving out of the world of business and into everyday life. Only about 7% of adults owned one. By 1998 it was 25%, neck and neck with the smokers, (see Post No 5 Do you mind if I smoke?) and by 1999 it had shot up to 46%.

All was reasonably peaceful but as we moved into the 2000s, phones became a major irritant in research groups as much as anywhere else, constantly going off and constantly getting answered in the middle of a group. The phone call had replaced the cigarette-break. When asked to turn their phones off people would always say that they needed to keep them on because of the baby-sitter or because they were expecting a call that just had to be taken.

The aural torture intensified with the advent of ringtones. The same excuses but a cacophony of Crazy Frog and Super Mario.

Everything got quieter with the advent of smartphones when phones became something you looked at rather than spoke to, but as phones became silent they become more intrusive, lurking in pockets, sneakily, sometimes even brazenly, checked when the long-winded respondent on the other side of the room started up again.

When hard stares were not enough, even a rebuke (‘can you put your phone away please?’) seemed to be received with a look of resentment rather than guilt.

So where are we now in 2025?

A deathly silence in the waiting room outside the studio because everyone is scrolling, whereas, back in 1995, respondents would have started to strike up conversations with each other (if they were getting chatty you knew you could throttle back on the warm-up, if quiet you knew you would have to work on it a bit more).

But, surprising to say, phone etiquette is getting better. Viewing facilities, like cinemas, simply tell everyone to turn their phones off as they enter the room. The house rules are clear. We understand why the research host wants us to keep our phones off, even though we’d rather be scrolling through TikTok.

What’s more phones can become tools to help in the discussion process. I’ve had respondents use their phones to source pictures to add to mood boards and to locate sound-tracks for creative ideas. They’ve checked facts and dates for me and helped each other (and me!) with train times and taxi numbers.

Phones have given us a lot to worry about, but there’s a lot to celebrate too, not least the demise of Crazy Frog

Chuck out your chintz’ commanded Ikea in an iconic campaign launched in 1996. The TV ad featured a streetful of women all hurling their flowery curtains and swirly carpets into an enormous blue skip and heading off to Ikea to replace it with, well, with the classic Scandi minimalism that we all now take for granted.

There was a sea-change in attitudes towards interior design in the 90s, but not everyone moved at the same speed.

While most people made the switch from plain to patterned, one set of living rooms held out, proudly espousing what today we would call maximalism, but was viewed by us back in the 90s as old-fashioned clutter.

Those were the living-rooms that belonged to the recruiters and those were the locations where we held so many focus groups. Rather bizarrely the UK used to operate a system where groups were held in the homes of the women (and they were always women) who had recruited the respondents. They would give over their living-rooms to groups, two a night, banishing husbands and children upstairs.

These living-rooms were shrines to knick-knack collections (and as a team of researchers we knew those living-rooms by those collectibles, ‘where were you last night? I was at the teapot lady’s’, ‘where are your groups tonight? At the Betty Boo house’, so called because the lady who lived there was obsessed with Betty Boo collectibles). These knick-knacks competed for space with Dralon sofas, scatter cushions, nests of coffee tables, pouffes, framed photos, curtains with tie-backs, side lights, standard lamps but somehow never enough seats for a group of 8.

Late arrivals would have to sit, for an hour and a half, on hard upright chairs brought in from the dining-room, but at least they didn’t have to be wedged in next to someone on a three-seater sofa that could really only take two.

You lived in mortal terror of someone knocking something over and laying waste to an irreplaceable teapot collection.

And then suddenly…it all changed. Recruiters got the Ikea memo, chucked out their chintz and went all minimal. Curtains were replaced by blinds, everything went beige, the mantelpiece was bare apart from one scented candle and all patterns were banished. You still went in mortal terror, but your fear was that someone would knock their tea over and ruin a cream carpet.

I have no idea whether recruiters have again moved with the times and become maximalists because no-one holds groups in their homes anymore. If they’re not online it’s a viewing studio or a hotel-room.

I haven’t seen a Betty Boo ceramic for a very long time.

Thank you for all your lovely and very funny stories of qual in home 90s style. It feels as if there is more than enough material there for a comedy series.

Indeed there is something very suburban sitcom about the whole process: people getting stuck in chairs, dogs leaving muddy footprints (and worse) over the stimulus material, shouting matches taking place offstage and the doorbell ringing every five minutes (because you can’t expect someone with an impressive teapot collection or a house stuffed full of Betty Boo memorabilia not to have a quirky and unusual door-bell tone).

Back in the 90s we had all been marinaded in sitcoms. All but the youngest adults would remember the classics from the 70s such as The Good Life, Man about the House, George & Mildred and from the 80s everyone would know No Place Like Home, Terry & June and then on into the 90s by One Foot in the Grave and Keeping up Appearances (both oddly recent for such traditional characters).

But then around 1995 there was a shift in the tectonic plates of comedy. Hyacinth Bouquet made her final exit that year. So did Victor Meldrew (bar a couple of Christmas specials).

From the mid-90s the ‘sit-‘ bit moved out of the 1930s semi and into the workplace: The Office 2001, The Thick of It 2005, Parks & Recreation 2009. This happened at about the same time as the focus group began to move out of the lounge and spend more and more time in the research studio.

The way the comedy was filmed changed as well, along with its feel and tone. The mockumentary style with handheld camerawork and absence of laughter track replaced the classic structure of the studio sitcom with guffawing audience and multi-camera set-up. This new style generated a different kind of laugh; awkward, embarrassing, cringe, rather than laugh out loud.

It seems entirely appropriate that the new style of comedy should coincide so neatly with the rise of the viewing studio. No dogs, no doorbells, no doilies, instead we have cameras, recording, one-way mirrors.

Welcome to the very strange world of the viewing studio.

Whether it’s 1995 or 2025 a research studio is a very odd place. It’s where I have spent so much of my working life that it’s completely ordinary but every so often it’s useful to defamiliarize yourself and spend time in a room facing the mirror, rather than with your back to it, and reflect on how odd it must appear to those participating.

Over the last 30 years we have become more and more used to cameras, to recording and filming ourselves so what would have seemed odd and creepy in 1995 now seems normal, even though many studios still have the cameras up in the ceiling CCTV style making us all look like criminal suspects or subjects of some weird psychological experiment.

But the mirror stays weird – you’re sitting surrounded by complete strangers, catching yourself in the glass every so often, wondering who’s on the other side and sometimes hearing laughter at inopportune moments if you’re in a studio with poor sound insulation. No wonder we need to pay attention to the warm-up (see Post No 7 Breaking the ice).

When I started my training I was taught to offer people the option of being able to go behind the mirror at the end of the session – in the spirit of openness and transparency – but only two kinds of people ever took me up on it.

One was children. I remember doing groups with 6/7 year olds on Nesquik and they absolutely loved going behind the mirror. They ran backwards and forwards between the studio and the viewing room, pressed their noses up against the glass, laughed uncontrollably at being able to pull faces at someone without them being able to see and inevitably got very excited by the posh snacks on offer behind the mirror (snacks do play an outsize role when you’re talking viewing studios).

The other group of people were teachers. I did a series of projects on teacher recruitment, both secondary and primary and these always entailed checking in with actual teachers, as well as potential teachers, to see how they felt about a new campaign or positioning. I did my usual thing when starting the group of saying ‘and if you want to take a look behind the mirror at the end of the session let me know…’ and, whadda you know, they did.

Showing the same curiosity about life as the kids…or perhaps just as skilled at sniffing out the premium snacks.

Moderators have an introductory patter. Just like cabin crew running through the airline safety protocols we inform all participants that there are no right or wrong answers and that they need to be civil and respect each other’s views. We also remind them that they are being recorded.

Back in 1995 this was more commonly audio, but in viewing studios groups were filmed. Now it’s always filming. Naturally we had to check that everyone was comfortable with this and reassure them that the film would be used properly and kept securely.

My 1995 introductory patter always contained a little light-hearted comment when we got to the recording bit, just to keep it relaxed and friendly in case all this filming started to seem a bit sinister. Over time this has changed and evolved to reflect society’s changing attitudes to technology and culture.

In 1995 the reference point was prank shows, like Beadle’s About or Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy TV. Here practical jokes were played on unsuspecting members of the public, filmed by hidden cameras. Beadle’s About more gentle, Dom Joly more surreal.

Five years on Big Brother had arrived and we were reassuring respondents that they were not going to find themselves taking part in some weird psychological experiment.

Five years on again in 2005 YouTube was launched and my patter included a little throwaway comment about not uploading the videos to YouTube (relax everyone, no chance of going viral from this research group).

As the Kardashians made their debut in 2007 celebrity culture started its relentless rise. Instagram arrived in 2010 (it’s weird how these tech innovations are so regularly spaced) and I was now making mock apologies for the sheer lack of coverage this research group recording would generate (sorry everyone, absolutely no chance of becoming a celeb here).

So where have we got to in 2025? Much greater concern about data security. The introduction of GDPR in 2018 has meant that society is now more aware of the importance of keeping data secure. Our respondents come to our sessions knowing how their data should be handled.

30 years ago I gave explanations about why we filmed, now I’m giving reassurance on what happens to that film. 30 years on I’ve also given up on the lame jokes.

When you think of the world of 1995 and what has changed most in 30 years you go straight to technology. 1995 qual is a feast for the lovers of retro tech. We always carried a tape recorder, with cassette tapes (and batteries), to record all groups outside of a studio. And if we did a long group, 2 ½ hours-3 hours, we’d need to change tapes. My old boss actually recalled carrying a reel-to-reel recorder to groups which blows my mind (getting strong George Martin vibes here)

When we showed respondents film we used video, and not just VHS. There was a higher quality bigger sized video format called a U-matic and unbelievably we used to have hire in special video players that could play U-matics. Recruiters were always totally bemused by having to accommodate a video player for a night when they already had one.

These are the obvious changes but technology affected how we managed research in other ways. Back in 1995 if we wanted to show people a storyboard we carried around stacks of thick poly-boards with pictures pasted on them. Now storyboards just get printed out on thin card or even paper, if they get printed out at all.

As a result of all this kit we had to carry around we set off for groups with one, sometimes two, giant art-bags which were definitely better suited to the taller person. If I carried a large one it was so big (and I’m so short) that it would drag on the ground. By the end of a week of fieldwork my back would be aching.

And as a result of all this kit we all drove, up and down the motorway, and even just when going off to an in-home group in Esher or Watford. We used to take taxis from our C London offices to the front rooms of suburbia (my company didn’t give us company cars) all the time.

In comparison the world of 2025 seems light and fluid. We touch screens, rather than push buttons. Nothing is carried, it’s all in the cloud.

It has actually been calculated that the UK reached peak stuff – its highest levels of physical material consumption – in 2006/07.

And as I dragged my art-bag to the viewing studio back in 1995 it felt like I was dragging most of that behind me.

Back in 1995 we paid our respondents in cash, handed out to them in little brown envelopes as they signed in on arrival. My first boss told us that they got paid immediately so they could relax and enjoy the session and not worry about when they were going to get paid. ‘Respondents’ he said, ‘like prostitutes, get paid in advance.’ Like I said, this was 1995.

Of course, there were times when a respondent signed in, grabbed their money and legged it, but this was rare. Most of the time they were happy to fulfil their side of the bargain.

Some people would tuck their envelopes in bag or pocket, some would open and check. I watched in fascination as one very posh high net worth respondent I was interviewing about private banking, literally grabbed the envelope from my hand and then proceeded very slowly and thoroughly to count out every single note of her sizeable incentive (£150). ‘Is that all?’ she said. I guess that’s how you put the ‘high’ in ‘high net worth’.

Carrying around enough cash to pay 2 groups in one night meant you were routinely carrying £800 in cash in your art-bag (not a night you would want to get mugged), alongside all the other material you were carting about (see Post No 13 The unbearable lightness of technology).

I never got mugged but I do one remember a panic-stricken moment one time. I had set off for groups with the usual enormous art-bag, dropped the incentives in between the polyboards, arrived at my destination but was NOT able to find the envelopes anywhere. My heart sank. What had happened to the £800?

‘Don’t worry’, my kindly recruiter said. ‘I was lucky on the horses yesterday’ and she proceeded to open a small drawer stuffed full of bank notes. The groups could go ahead but my money was still missing.

Later when I got back to the office I discovered that there was a small side pocket in the enormous art-bag and the envelopes had been slipped inside that. Huge relief.

The extraordinary thing about the cash in brown envelopes was that it should have been a process swept away by technology much earlier than it was. It was only around 2020 (when everything went online) that our respondents routinely got paid by bank transfer and our bags got lighter once more.

I have spent most of my research career focusing on comms and would always start a creative development group with a bit of scene-setting about advertising in general, to get respondents in the zone before showing them the specific creative ideas. It served several purposes: firstly it got them into the context of the adbreak or wherever they would come across the new idea in real life, secondly it got them thinking about a topic they would usually spend most of their time passively absorbing rather than actively discussing and thirdly to talk about ‘any ads you’ve seen recently that have stuck in your mind?’ was so easy it worked brilliantly to break the ice. At least in 1995 it did.

Thirty years ago everyone could think of a memorable ad. What’s more everyone could think of a memorable and enjoyable ad, whether cute, funny, endearing, emotional, aspirational or suspenseful. To be fair they could think of a whole load of ads that were intensely irritating too, but we tended to keep people off that discussion so we didn’t descend into a spiral of criticism.

At any one time there was usually a favourite ad that everyone could recall, which topped our discussion for a month or so before the next one came along. In March 1995 the No 1 was the Guinness ‘dancing man’. It’s still a fun watch – very TikTok.

We did however recruit people who were more into advertising and we did this by looking for the ones who agreed with the statement, ‘sometimes I think the ads are better than the programmes.’ This statement was complete orthodoxy in the 1980s (Levis Launderette? the Gold Blend couple?) and still mainstream in 1995 (ultimately I think it’s actually more of a measure of the quality of programming than the advertising – we were still four years away from The Sopranos and the start of the so-called Golden Age of TV in 1995 so the programmes weren’t putting up as steep a competition as they would later).

It would be hard to find people who would agree with this statement now, just as it is indeed virtually impossible for anyone to think of an ad off the top of their heads. People aren’t watching ad-breaks, they’re actively avoiding ads when they can and the ads they do see tend to be online and are functional hard sell rather than entertaining.

The exception is Christmastime when the retailers bring out the big guns and we get a John Lewis tear-jerker or an M&S extravaganza. People love ads like this when they see them, so in November-December we can re-use that 1995 warm-up question. It works a treat for all but the most hard core of Scrooges.

So in a year when the Guinness dancing man ad was No1 in our league table of most liked what was the most disliked?

Interestingly there was a whole category of household products that regularly topped that list. That category was laundry detergent, or, as it was usually referred to then, ‘washing powder’.

The Daz Doorstep Challenge campaign seemed to be the prime offender. In 1995 it was in its pomp. The campaign featured radio presenter Danny Baker (Shane Richie and Michael Barrymore also featured) knocking on doors and asking the women (and it was always women) who opened the door (no Amazon Ring in 1995) to bring out their whites. Conveniently these women were always doing the laundry or the ironing just when the film crew arrived and therefore ready to tell Danny all about their laundry satisfaction levels.

Danny is not a subtle presenter and his green jacket is rather lary, although it does set off the red of the pack brilliantly. This is a triumph of branding. To prove that it is live we even see the film crew following him.

Everyone found the campaign annoying, although by the standards of many other campaigns described as irritating it is comparatively restrained. There are no irritating earworms and it displays the kind of single-minded focus on the product benefits that any clean-fluencer would welcome.

But when we talked to women about this campaign it was clear that it was worse than irritating, it was deeply patronising.

Detergent ads were the lightning rod for the feminism of the 80s and 90s, decades where more and more mothers were going out to work (50% of mothers worked outside the home in 1985, 63% in 1995 and now it’s around 76%). The category as a whole seemed hopelessly out of date, women wanted themselves to be shown as sassy, in control and with much more on their minds than their children’s vests.

Looked at from the perspective of 2025 the campaign feels creepy as well as patronising. The housewives featured seem awkward and embarrassed; there is a real power imbalance between Danny as the brand and authority figure controlling the action and the housewife who complies meekly by bringing her whites out for inspection on the doorstep and protests that if she knew he was coming she’d have put on some make-up.

We’d welcome back the Guinness dancing man 30 years on, but, sorry Danny, you can stay in 1995.

It’s 1130, it’s 1995 and it’s time for a Diet Coke break. If the Daz Doorstep Challenge insisted on keeping women trapped in the past behind an ironing board, the Diet Coke break brought them right into the future, out of the kitchen into the office, getting rather breathless and excited every morning by the sight of a construction worker taking his top off to enjoy a Diet Coke.

This was definitely an ad that our groups scored high on appeal and memorability and it is classic 90s. Our groups relished the reversal of the familiar trope of man on building site leching over women to show women eyeing up a man. This was seen as, to use a very 90s term, female empowerment and the women in our groups loved it.

It was only three years since the Chippendales had started touring in the UK and two years before The Full Monty came out. Mark Wahlberg’s impressive pecs had already been creating waves in a notorious Calvin Klein ad campaign so Diet Coke was part of a trend rather than creating one. But it still felt striking: all these buff male bodies seemed very new after decades of imagery of semi-clad women and fully clothed men.

The men we spoke to did not seem too bothered by the increase in male nudity. ‘It’s just a bit of fun’ was the stock response. There was more negativity in comments about ‘reverse sexism’ and a sense that women couldn’t really complain about men leering at them if they themselves were doing the same thing. We also picked up the odd remark, mainly from younger men, that this was putting an unprecedented pressure on them to work out and look good (‘those impossible torsos’).

The Diet Coke break was hugely successful for the brand and was developed into a campaign which lasted right up until 2015 and was being parodied by other brands as recently as 2019. Thirty years on we’re still surrounded by images of ripped muscles and male torsos in media imagery but the public discourse about how men and women view each other and what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour has become much more fraught and complicated.

Time for a break. It’s 1130.

Back to 1995 and forward to Christmas.

Apologies for such an out of season comment but my start-point for today’s post is a Christmas ad that, you guessed it, first appeared in 1995 and allows me to segue effortlessly from Diet Coke to the master-brand itself, Coca-Cola. No sponsorship or commercial tie-ups involved, just a fascinating ad that opens up a human insight and illustrates nicely what has changed since 1995 and what has stayed the same.

‘Holidays are coming’, Coca-Cola’s Christmas ad has appeared every year since 1995, using the same ingredients, the glittering trucks, Christmas lights, the familiar jingle with a Christmas arrangement, the excited crowds and the beaming Santa (the belief that Santa’s iconic red outfit was originally created by Coca-Cola itself for their Christmas campaign is not actually true).

Our audiences loved the ad when it came out and they have loved it ever since. Its consistency is its virtue – just like Christmas itself people want to see the same thing every year. Its great strength is the feeling of anticipation it generates – many Christmas ads play on sentimentality and family feeling, evoke a sense of magic and glamour or tell a Christmas take. Coca-Cola evokes excitement, ‘holidays are coming’ and thus can occupy a unique space in the Christmas pantheon. Our respondents sit back in their chairs, give a little wriggle and say ‘that’s when I know Christmas is coming’.

However last Christmas Coca-Cola did change something. Using AI they created a new execution of the Christmas ad – all the same ingredients re-worked using the latest technology.

In 1995 ads made with the latest technology meant something very different. CGI was in its infancy, people were much less familiar with what it could do and it could do a lot less than it can now. It was much harder for them to imagine what an ad would look like if it used special effects. Our reference point was the hugely successful Jim Carrey movie The Mask which came out in 1994, ‘you know that movie The Mask, this ad is going to use the same kind of special effects as that did’ and everyone became very excited.

Unlike the technology of 1995 which created images that were dramatically different people who watched the latest Christmas Coca-Cola ad often didn’t realise it was AI at all. And given that, unlike 1995, this was a technology that makes people uneasy rather than excited it’s probably just as well.

One of the things that has remained constant throughout the last 30 years is the fact that marketers seem so little interested in the over 55s.

Media briefs usually stop at 55 and as a result we rarely speak to anyone over that age in our research groups, unless we’re researching funeral-plans or cruises.

What has changed is the nature of those older people.

If you were 55 in 1995 you would have been born in 1940 at the height of WW2 and you would have been 14 when food rationing finally ended. You hadn’t technically become an adult until the age of 21 and could easily have got married before you became an adult (with a wedding photo in black and white). You were probably a grandparent by 1995.

Those older people felt a long way off to the generations below them and to me just starting out they felt ancient. The only time I talked to a group older than 55 in the mid-90s was a project on Liquorice Allsorts which had a special place in the hearts of those who vividly remembered sweets coming off rationing in 1953.

This older group consistently referred to brands as ‘makes’ and dismissed advertising as a waste of money. They found it a lot harder to talk about brand image and struggled much more than younger people to extrapolate from stimulus material to a finished idea.

In contrast a 55 year old in 2025 was born in 1970 having never known anything but a world of consumerism. They became an adult in 1988 and probably co-habited before marrying at around 30 (with a wedding video to mark the occasion). They’re unlikely to be a grandparent as their first child will be still at uni.

Today’s 55 year olds probably do still feel old to the young researcher of 2025, old enough to be their parents but the way they talk about the world, about brands and marketing and the way they interact with their own children is light years away from those old people of the 90s.

They’re still not included in many research projects though…

Back to 1995 and my first steps as a baby moderator, ‘how to get respondents to stop talking’. However much you tell the group at the beginning that you don’t want anyone dominating the discussion there is always one person who just won’t stop talking.

Both men and women can be guilty of that, but the way they do it is different. The difference is fascinating and long-standing.

Women who dominate the conversation talk in a stream. It’s usually repetitive, it feels almost instinctive and they will often be unaware that they are taking over the group. Stream of consciousness respondents are not uniquely women, you get male versions too.

But there is another style of over-talking that feels very male and also older (at least 50). It’s when an individual gives an opinion that is expressed as fact or explains a commonplace as if the speaker were the only individual in the group equipped to make the point.

This is someone who will give you his opinion as if he’s an expert and you know nothing. Every comment becomes a speech. He doesn’t just tell you that he gets frustrated by an ad that doesn’t clearly indicate what the brand is, he lectures you, ‘the thing is you’ll find there are so many adverts these days that don’t tell you who they’re for, and advertising can’t work if you don’t know it’s for’ (well, d’oh, why didn’t I think of that?). He will make a very simple point at length with no sense at all that anyone else in the group is bored and when you lift your hand to indicate that you need to move on to someone else, he will look surprised, even hurt, and then attempt unsuccessfully to sum up when all you need him to do is shut up.

Before the term ‘mansplaining’ became common parlance I used to mentally refer to it as ‘middle-aged men banging on’. But it all feels pretty mansplainy to me – I don’t get it from younger men or from women and I’m hoping it is not something that younger men will grow into as they hit middle age. I feel the mansplainer might have got older in the 30 years I’ve been a researcher, now closer to 60 rather than 40 and my sincere hope is that this is a mode of behaviour that will become extinct over the next 30 years, but is still, in 2025, alive and droning.

Back in 1995 our assumption when we designed the sample for qual projects was that men and women were best kept apart in a very Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus way. Indeed the book of that title had been published just three years before and the phrase had lodged itself firmly within the discourse.

We felt then that the response of either sex might be inhibited by the presence of the other and that therefore you wouldn’t get the most honest answer from a mixed sex group. So you kept them distinct (just as you did with class and age).

Even in the case of a category like financial services that seems pretty gender-neutral we would be conducting single sex groups. In the past there would have been no surprise at that, indeed there would almost be an expectation from the participants, as well as the clients, that research groups would be all male or all female.

It feels like an over-reaction to us now but society then did still operate in a more gendered way and did not have quite the same default expectations of equality. Female groups modelled themselves on coffee mornings (you didn’t ‘go for a coffee’ in the 90s, Starbucks did not arrive until 1998) and male groups on pub chats. Everyone felt pretty comfortable like that, although groups of women were always easier to moderate than groups of men (interestingly not so much the case now).

Many occupations were more gendered then (eg retail was much more female in the 90s, law and medicine much more male). Certain categories like grocery shopping and food preparation were inevitably almost all the responsibility of women. Men did buy groceries and cook, and certainly younger ones did, but older men who did were in the minority. An all-male group would feel like a special case.

Back then men and women talked more readily about each other in stereotypes – and would not be challenged for making assumptions that we would now jump on as sexist, even if the stereotype contained a grain of truth. The cliché of women caring more about the colour of a car than the power of the engine was and is undoubtedly true even if it sounds sexist and would have undoubtedly cropped up as a comment in both groups

So in 2025 are we missing out on the insight because no-one dare call out the stereotypes in the mixed group? I hope not. Indeed as relationships between the sexes have changed and evolved I think we have reached the point where there are men in a mixed group happy to admit they care more about the colour too.

In 2025 Dads are all around us: dad bods, dad jokes, dad dancing, dad rock, centrist dads. But dads didn’t dominate the language or the culture in the same way in 1995.

Thirty years ago we were much more concerned with New Lads rather than Dads. The New Lad was a term that was three years old in 1995, coined by Arena journalist Sean O’Hagan. It summed up the media stereotype of 90s man, who was into booze, bantz, girls and footie just like the old days, but because he was knowingly and ironically badly behaved could somehow be let off the hook more easily (or so it was claimed). Then in 1994 Loaded magazine was launched and the phenomenon of the New Lad exploded.

New Lads were everywhere in advertising (think The Lynx effect, French Connection FCUK, Pot Noodle’s The Slag of all Snacks) and the culture, but in real life we were seeing the steady advance of the dad.

More and more in the introductory chats at the beginning of groups we were hearing about what dads did with their children and how much their lives revolved around kid activity at weekends. The phrase ‘hands on dad’ began to creep into the conversation, but hands off dads had not been that far away in time and it showed.

I vividly remember exploring an image of a dad shopping in a supermarket with a toddler in a buggy in one of my groups and my 90s men interpreting the situation as that of the divorced dad looking after his kid that weekend. The default carer was always the mother. We didn’t even have paternity leave (granted 2003).

One dad did express his irritation to me about how often dads were shown as bumbling and idiotic (think Homer Simpson, a fixture in the culture since 1989 or Daddy Pig in Peppa Pig, first appeared on our screens in 2004 or Motherland’s Kevin, first seen in 2016). Hapless dads exist of course out of the need to position Mums as multi-tasking, resourceful, capable in order not to seem sexist.

Intriguingly I did not come across many other men objecting to these cliches, which seems to suggest that they don’t feel as threatened by this representation as one might think.

In 1995 we had certainly come a long way from 1975 when fathers of children under 5 spent less than 15 minutes a day with them, but I’m not so sure how much the pace has picked up since then.

There are currently 150,000 stay at home dads in the UK, whereas in 1995 it was…110,000.

Motherland’s Kevin remains an outlier.

There’s been an underlying theme to many of the changes I’ve observed in the last 30 years and that’s a sense of greater flexibility and inclusiveness. What were rigid demarcations in the past (of class, of age, of sex) have now relaxed, leading to a more open and variegated approach to designing research programmes and an expansion in the ways we explore what people are thinking and feeling.

One key example is our knowledge and awareness of neuro-diversity. This was a word that barely existed in 1995. It was first used formally in a thesis by a sociologist Judy Singer in 1998 but as a concept had existed in online forums before then (I’d like to think I could peg its first use to 1995 exactly but that’s wishful thinking on my part).

It’s a word used most often in the contest of autistic spectrum disorders but, more broadly, it simply refers to the range of differences in individual brain function and behaviours.

We’re used to all kinds of different people being recruited for focus groups and when I started out we used to think of them as chatty vs quiet, quick vs slow, boring vs interesting, agreeable vs difficult. As you’ll spot immediately these are pretty value-driven judgements.

As I became more experienced I became aware of other differences between individuals. Some processed information much better aurally than visually and could recognise the voice of a celebrity used in a voiceover immediately, whilst others had barely noticed there was a voiceover at all.

When asked to write down their first reactions to a concept, some scribbled a half page, some struggled to write a couple of words. Some would say ‘I can’t write anything, I haven’t got my glasses’ and we used to sigh and reiterate to our recruiters that everyone must bring their glasses to the sessions and that potential respondents must be informed that they would have to write as well as talk in a research group (hoping that anyone with literacy problems would deselect themselves thus making our lives easier).

Now I look back on this and wonder if those who had forgotten their glasses were more likely to be dyslexic or dysgraphic and remind myself that those who struggle to express their thoughts in writing are often fluent and articulate when speaking.

We have the benefit now of flexible technologies that offer a multiplicity of ways for people to respond to us. People can respond online in text, video or audio. We can speak in-person or online, synchronously or asynchronously, and we use much greater range of techniques to elicit response from our participants.

I’m sure, 30 years on, we get a richer and more rounded response by recognising the differences in the way individuals process information. I hope we have also created a kindlier and more generous research experience for all.

‘Tell me what you like to do when you’re not working or looking after the family?’ (and we’re back to the warm-up, see No 7 Breaking the ice). There are some tried and trusted answers to this one. Very few people have unusual hobbies or leisure pursuits or if they do they aren’t disclosing them. It’s usually to do with fitness, friends and family, plus a lot of walking the dog.

It is also, more and more, about eating. Again and again people tell us that ‘food’ or ‘eating out’ is one of their favourite leisure pursuits.

Back in 1995 ‘food’ wasn’t cited as a hobby. People socialised with friends and family in pubs and restaurants. And they cooked (more frequently than they do in the 2020s) but they weren’t eating out as routinely and as variously as they do now.

But the food revolution all starts in the 90s: first gastro pub (The Eagle in Farringdon Road 1991), the first Wagamama opens (1992, hello katsu curry), Nigella’s first cookbook (How to Eat) comes out in 1998 and Jamie’s first (The Naked Chef) a year later. Excitingly exotic foods such as hummus, sushi, pesto, sun-dried tomatoes start to become normalised.

Back in the 90s that there was a real difference between London and everywhere else. Ingredients that were becoming commonplace in the capital still felt unusual outside, even in the other big cities like Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle where we most often conducted our groups (balti being the honourable exception, less familiar to those outside Birmingham).

We caveated the findings on any food project when it came to reporting on how different locations perceived new concepts. What was familiar in the capital could be met with bemusement elsewhere.

All that started to change as we move into the 00s and wave after wave of new kinds of foods from all over the world arrived in our restaurants and on our supermarket shelves. In the 2000s we got chipotle, wasabi, sweet chilli, more hummus, in the 2010s we got into matcha lattes, kimchi, vegan absolutely everything (how could we forget the Greggs vegan sausage rolls), flavoured hummus and now in the 2020s it’s oat milk, NOLO alcohol, sourdough, sriracha and a panic when there was a hummus shortage predicted in 2022.

We don’t see the same disparities between regions now. Supermarkets, TV cooks, social media and the culinary influences of so many different cultures all helped to break down the regional divides between cities. You don’t have to live in London any more to know what kombucha or kefir is.

Sadly the cost of living crisis is going to have an effect on the frequency with which people can indulge their favourite hobby. More cooking? Or more deliveries (the other big foodie trend in the last decade) or simply more ready meals?

What will it also mean for the other big leisure pursuit we haven’t talked about? That’s No 25.

Eurostar had been launched in 1994 with an abstract and stylish futuristic ad, Not One Day But Today. easyJet launched in 1995, with a bright orange ad campaign that was not so stylish (London to Edinburgh for the price of a pair of jeans. £29.95 in case you were wondering, not much has changed there). The peace dividend of the 90s after the Berlin Wall came down meant that air-fields all over Europe were freed up for commercial flights. Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Michael O’Leary wasted no time taking advantage of this. The age of cheap travel was born and we didn’t look back, Covid was a temporary blip and while people can afford it the travel boom continues.

We researchers travelled so much in the 90s too: blithely taking art-bags of stimulus material as hand baggage, gorging on peculiar snacks behind the mirror in viewing studios, jumping in and out of taxis in a pre-Google maps world, building the cost of phone calls from the hotel into an international costing and being almost totally sealed off from the office back in London in a world before email.

Covid and Zoom brought all that to an end. Now we watch streamed groups and listen to simultaneous translators without moving from home. I don’t miss the 4am starts or the frustration of sitting in a darkened room in a foreign city while the sun is shining or the bars are opening, but you don’t build insights into the cultures you are researching in the same way if you don’t leave your house when you go round the world.

It may be all over the news now but back in 1995 diversity was a word used more in the context of gardening than anything else. We certainly didn’t think much about getting a range of ethnicities in our research groups and it wouldn’t have occurred to us to question a lack of diversity when we had an all-White British group.

Thirty years ago we were wary of too much atypicality in any element of a research spec and we saw less of it. In the 1991 census the country was 95% White British/Irish/Other, but by 2021 it was 76% and in London 37%. We didn’t even see much diversity within the regions. You might get the odd Mancunian or Scottish respondent in a London group but people always sounded like the place they lived in (still a real challenge for any Southern moderator grappling with Belfast or Glaswegian accents).

I remember a Domestos group with housewives (yes it’s 1995, see Post No 1 The Housewife) where one of the women was German (it was unusual in 1995 to have anyone from any other European country in a focus group). She used vinegar to clean her toilet. The rest of the group were fascinated and horrified in equal measure, ‘why would you want your toilet smelling of fish and chips?’ asked one mystified woman. Now any proper cleaning influencer extols the power of vinegar and we’re celebrating all kinds of toilet hacks.

We used to worry that if we had people in groups raised in a different country they wouldn’t understand the creative ideas we were showing them – ‘what if they don’t get the references?’ – and would want to make sure our participants were ‘culturally fluent’ so we didn’t get a group blown off course by a person who didn’t know who Morecambe & Wise were or had never watched Blue Peter.

In 1995 those people would indeed be outliers – thirty years ago every person in a research group would have grown up with Blue Peter. We used to insist that everyone had a TV so we could feel confident that we had a mainstream group. In 1995, when ads were developed for mass audiences, that mattered.

In 2025 it doesn’t matter where we were born, what we watched on TV as kids or how we clean our toilets. We strive to reflect the rich diversity of the UK population. In a fragmented media landscape we are all minorities now.

Even in the more inclusive world of 2025 there is one group of people we always exclude from focus groups. Just as we did in 1995.

If you work in advertising, journalism or marketing services or have a close friend or family member in those roles you won’t, or shouldn’t, be admitted into a research group. You’re assumed to be too knowledgeable, prone to instruct others on the way marketing works and therefore too likely to reduce the rest of the group to silence or push them into negativity.

Any group participant who seems suspiciously well informed about the marketing process is assumed by those watching to be a Secret Marketer who has infiltrated the group. There was a story doing the rounds back in the day, probably apocryphal, that a marketing director’s wife took part in a research group, concealing her connections, and was recognised by a colleague of her husband’s behind the mirror.

A super-informed participant could also suggest sloppy recruitment (less likely to be apocryphal).

The third explanation is simply that ordinary consumers are more knowledgeable and sophisticated than we give them credit for.

In 1995 marketing was much more of a closed book. Terms such as ‘brief’, ‘target’ or even ‘brand image’ were not common currency. We put our introductions in user-friendly language, ‘what they’re trying to say’ or ‘the way they have designed the ads.’ We avoided insider language.

But gradually as the discipline of marketing seeped into everyday life our respondents got better and better informed.

From the 90s onwards there was a steady growth in people studying marketing at university and shows about business on TV became more common: Troubleshooter from 1990, Dragons Den from 2005 and most notoriously of all The Apprentice, also launched in the UK in 2005 after launching in the US the year before (and we all know what happened afterwards).

Those thrusting young entrepreneurs from Team Velocity or Team Impact were always being sent off by Lord Sugar to dream up a new snack bar devising advertising campaigns which they then put through focus groups and so familiarising mass audiences with every stage of the marketing process.

But since the 90s there has also been a steady growth in the number of organisations from the local builder to new universities (polytechnics were granted university status in 1992), from the pizzeria round the corner to NHS trusts (set up in 1990) who needed to position themselves in a newly competitive marketplace. Even those who don’t work in marketing got exposed to marketing thinking.

In 2025 we have benefited enormously from a richer, more informed response in a focus group. We treat our participants as equal collaborators rather than as lab rats…or the marketing director’s spouse.

‘Let’s ask the respondents if they have any suggestions themselves. We want to hear from them’ is a request that always comes through from the viewers behind the mirror. My heart sinks.

Easy to think that you’ll be peppered with suggestions for an alternative music track, celeb, example of a further execution within a campaign idea.

Doesn’t happen like that. Group participants have never been as good as coming up with further ideas as the brand team expects them to, whether it’s 1995 or in 2025.

Research participants do like a jab at the creative team ‘Don’t like this one, they should fire the creative director’ and there’s often someone who pipes up with a suggestion that makes me cringe but which is never seen that way by anyone else in the group who will all invariably be chortling ‘make sure you copyright that’.

So what’s changed? Apart from my rising irritation with audience suggestions.

We’re all creatives now. Every social media post is of course a mini ad.

Technology first taught us the techniques and then gave us the tools to put them into practice.

In the early 00s the arrival of DVDs provided audiences with a crash course in moviemaking. All those DVD extras taught people the language of films – storyboards, establishing shots, close-up, V/O, cut to, fade, supers – and then video cameras and later phones gave us the means to make them ourselves.

The growth of home computing introduced us to fonts, typefaces, proofing, and phone cameras to the techniques of the professional photographer, filters, cropping, saturated colour.

Those creative skills now get showcased in workshops. We really didn’t do workshops in 1995.

But send a team of 2025 people off to a break-out room, with a flip-chart and a pack of felt-tips, ask them to come up with an idea for a new campaign for the brand in question, purely for the purposes of engagement and facilitation, and they will be back 20mins later with a sticky hashtag, a punning slogan and some surprisingly expressive stick men.

The creative team can still sleep easy, but participant outputs are definitely sharper, funnier and much more self-aware than they ever were in the 90s.

Most importantly every one of them comes with a zinger of a team name. Back to Lord Sugar again.

Right up until 2020 the life of a qual researcher meant a life on the road. In thirty years the biggest change to a researcher’s working life happened in 2020.

In-person groups ended. Zoom started and online groups have been the default ever since.

My working life before that meant an awful lot of train journeys. I’m not a train spotter but I do love a train trip. Even now.

I’m even happy with a suburban train to Hatch End or Bushey, although my biggest treat was a trip all the way to Aberdeen, 8am train from Kings Cross, 2pm from Edinburgh, to arrive in time for evening groups. Perfect.

Train trips feel like proper journeys, a reminder that you are going somewhere different – ready to meet different people, receive different opinions and hear different accents. You get into ‘receive’ mode in a way that you can’t when driving. You can have a power nap, essential for me if the groups don’t finish until after 10, a big cup of tea and time off the phone because the signal is bound to be bad. You have time for thinking.

Even cab rides from the station have yielded fascinating insights from the driver curious to know what’s in the art-bag. Warning, this doesn’t always end well. I did once get into a shouting match with a taxi driver who was insisting women’s lives in Saudi were so much better than in the UK.

You get into (less fraught) conversations with the hosts of the venue, whether in a hotel or a recruiter’s front room or a studio.

You get reminded of what makes places different and distinct; whether it’s Irn Bru ads in the Glasgow taxi or Welsh language signs on the station in Cardiff, the offer of a ‘brew’ in Manchester or ‘pop’ in Birmingham, and most notoriously whether it’s ‘dinner’ or ‘tea’.

And yes, it’s absolutely true that people outside London are more friendly, with a special shout out to the Brummies. I have laughed more in groups in Birmingham than anywhere else in the country and much less than I expected in Liverpool.

I know that a Zoom call allows you to speak to all kinds of people from all over the country, including the kinds of locations we didn’t get to in the past, like the middle of Wales or the Isle of Wight, and I have valued the insights gained from the opening up of previously closed worlds.

But I get itchy feet in my own office. Book me for groups in Aberdeen. Please.

It’s time to leave 1995, where the biggest season finale was Season 2 of The X Files, climb back into the De Lorean and return to the present.

Compared with 1995 the world of 2025 feels more fluid, more open, more diverse and certainly lighter (I’m so not going to miss those art-bags).

It’s more educated, more individualistic, more knowing but also more anxious and more wary.
Its older generations are more hedonistic, perhaps because they were young in 1995, its younger generations more restrained and careful.

Thank you for coming with me. I truly did not expect there to be so much engagement.

The word that has popped up most in the comments has been ‘enjoy’. Not something I usually associate with LinkedIn.

Insight No 30 has to be that the world of market research and insight is full of lovely people and always has been.

Little bit of diagnostics before I go…

Like true market researchers you were most engaged by the posts about demographics – social class, housewives, and the changing nature of older people, or maybe you just liked those wedding photos.

But also, as befitting children of the 90s, you engaged very strongly with the posts on Alcohol, Cigarettes and Chintz.

And finally…

I was surprised to see how many of you check LinkedIn at the weekends. You need to get out more.

Lucy Banister

The Nursery