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In 2025, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini all released their deep research tools. They take a brief, clarify it with you, run the desk research, and produce a fully-referenced report, in less than 30 minutes. This sounds impressive. But how good is the…

Have you seen James Endersby’s (Chair of the MRS) post last week about how tough life is right now for clientside insight teams? I can’t stop thinking about it. In his conversations with various insight leaders, a few themes emerged. They’re battling…

All insight budgets are under pressure. In this environment, we all need to make sure we squeeze every drop of value out of what we’ve already spent. I sat down with the brilliant Julia Joskey from Data Translators to discuss this. In…

Dan’s swimming 10k down the River Dart in September. It’s swimming’s equivalent of a marathon. He’s raising money for Level Water – a charity providing swimming lessons to children with disabilities across the UK. It’s a fantastic charity Dan has raised money…

The central challenge of the MRS Storytelling conference last week was how to tell better stories. It’s a pain point in the insight sector. And to be honest, most sectors. All audiences are bombarded with so much content. We need stories to…

As an independent consultant, I could feel powerless when it comes to equality and diversity. I’m a white, middle-class male in a business of one. How can I possibly increase the diversity of my business? Fortunately, the MRS and ICG have worked…

It’s been a full 12 years to the day since I set up Shed Research – multi-award winning customer insight consultancy. I often get asked “Why Shed?”. It was partly about shedding light on old insight and partly about the need to…

We’re really pleased to be able to offer on-demand training in insight synthesis through our partnership with Insight Platforms Academy. Our Get Started with Insight Synthesis course (“Do more with less”) is available to now. ENROL NOW With clear principles, relevant examples…

We’re delighted to be on the shortlist again for the ICG Independent Consultant Award at the MRS Awards 2022. This year, we’re being recognised for our work with Futures Housing Group developing their board reporting using systems thinking. There’s more to read…

Most organisations I speak to, whether they’re commercial or charities, are concerned about one thing – the cost of living crisis. There’s so much uncertainty. How will consumers react? What spending will they prioritise? And how will this change next year? Luckily, there’s…

I was presenting at the MRS Storytelling conference on Thursday. There was loads of great content around how to tell better stories with research and insight. Practical tips telling us what to do. And inspirational sessions showing us how it’s done. I…

Mel Hughes (Futures Housing) and Dan Young (Shed Research) hosted an AURA webinar on 1st December. We spoke about our work improving Board reporting using a systems-thinking approach. We talked about our challenge, the process we went through, and what you need…

Last week, we were delighted to win the 2020 MRS Independent Consultant award, run by the ICG. We were recognised for our work with Primark. Work that involved no new research and helped Primark turn around declining sales in a key market….

The title sounds like the start of a bad joke. But let me explain… Last week, I was awarded the Best Agency Speaker award at the 2020 AURAs. These are the only awards in the research and insight sector voted purely by…

This week, Dan from Shed was shortlisted for Best Agency Speaker at the 2020 AURA Awards. This is really exciting for us. Nobody can put themselves forward for this, or any of the other AURA awards. It’s based purely on the feedback…

There’s been so much (consumer) research flying around about Coronavirus over the past week. We couldn’t resist pulling it all together in a handy summary. It’s what we do, after all. We’ve focused on how the UK public is reacting rather than…

Coronavirus is dominating the global agenda. People are understandably worried. Worried for their health, worried for the health of their loved ones, and worried for their jobs. We’re all changing our habits. We’re reducing human contact, face-to-face meetings are becoming video conferences…

As the opening speaker at the Festival of Marketing (FoM) yesterday, Mark Ritson (renowned Professor of Marketing) was as combative as ever. He spoke about some analysis he’d done of 5,900 submissions to the Effies. They’re advertising effectiveness awards. Winning these is…

A lot of organisations are sitting on a huge amount of research and data. Over the summer, we’ve helped all sorts of businesses and charities use this insight to its fullest. Each organisation has years of research. They want to take stock…

There were lots of great talks at the Insight Show and AURA Conference last week. From everything, three central themes stood out most. But like research, hearing interesting things is only worthwhile if you’re able to act on them. In this spirit,…