Bursting Bubbles

In 2017, The Atlantic proposed that Facebook should lead an experiment counter to the social bubbles created by their algorithms. Long story short, it's a "friend swap" that matches Americans across political lines to help bridge the country’s deep divide. (See link.)

What if we applied this thinking to marketing research? I've been thinking a lot about social bubbles and the impact on ideation and qualitative methodologies. Part of identifying a great insight is the ability to get outside of ourselves. To understand another point of view, another way of solving something. Yet, one of the first requests in research is to make sure the recruit is "just right." That typically means a group of similar people with shared behaviors or beliefs - in essence, we're creating a respondent bubble.

What if we just mixed it up? The like-mindedness feeds into our tendencies as humans to have implicit bias in many, everyday choices. However, if we assembled a group of people with differing opinions and behaviors, perhaps we can move past implicit bias into something more meaningful and thought-provoking. Bursting the "bubble effect" in marketing research could lead to a less rote approach to the methodology and in doing so, elevate the learning to a much more interesting outcome.