Secrets and synchronicities -- Ava Lindberg's blog

I am thinking about the fundamentals of the creative process.  The first part is radical brainstorming, ideation, and the stretch of divergence — in which many ideas are created to solve a central opportunity. During this free-form divergence phase, the facilitator and team will tap into many different creative exercises to expand, liberate, and augment the mind of the team from old thinking, unprofitable constructions, and strongly held but not viable preliminary ideas.

At some point in the creative process, we stop diverging and go to convergence.   The model of Creative Problem Solving has the intersections of divergence and convergence move like an electrocardiogram up and down, up and down, throughout the entire process.  Sometimes, for lack of time, however, we simply divide the time in half.  The first half is pure divergence, the D phase.   The second half is pure convergence, the C phase.  Convergence means that, given the huge pile of ideas we’ve just created, we now brainstorm criteria for choosing a few of these ideas for further exploration, and then begin to actively select the most potentially doable and intriguing ideas to expand, evaluate, and finetune in the C phase.

During this later C phase and after we’ve explored the potential of new ideas, we might come to the sub-phase called Great Doubt.  We take a few of the ideas that are promising and subject them to deep questioning.  This is intentional.  We question every element of the idea with strictness laced with kindness.   This is never a first step –which is the usual mistake of untrained teams — but one of the last.  Great Doubt is applied in order to be sure that the enactment of a particular idea has not forgotten something major and important.

I took this idea from Gengo Merzel who is a Zen master and Jungian philosopher with a website and process called Big Mind.   The reference to his blog, Big Mind, is http://bigmind.org/blog/the-value-of-questioning-everything

I’m planning on trying Great Doubt as one of the final convergence exercises that I train on for an upcoming creativity training workshop for qualitative researchers in Dallas called Facilitating Consciously:  A Mini-Training Workshop on Creative Techniques.    As the reader reviews the article below, one can change the word “enlightenment” to “creativity.”   One can alternate the word Buddha for “process.”    It is true that in qualitative market research and creative process, we hope to attain many things — insight, understanding, a good idea, a solution, breakthrough, unique selling proposition, direction, and the core of a successful strategic plan.  But, during the creative session itself, it can be beneficial to allow a period of Great Doubt to finalize the ideas and action plans before getting carried away on the heels of overexcitement, anticipation, and positive expectations, as valuable as enthusiasm and spirit for the work can be.

Always, in creativity, we must consciously alternate expansion of possibilities and free-form ideation with intentionally imposed limits, contractions, and doubt  in order to shape the final solution into a truly workable breakthrough.  Rather than blind faith — as valuable as this can be at the outset of a creative session — Great Doubt at the end may make the difference in how we view the category, brand, and our world.

The Value of Questioning Everything

Genpo Roshi, January 21, 2013

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research | No Comments »

When training a team to go into in situ environments in a way that makes both team and subjects comfortable immediately and throughout the length of the ethnography — and encourages authentic behavior of the subjects under observation — a few guidelines are helpful to conduct authentic ethnography.  Authentic ethnography is a less reactive, more spontaneous, purer observational process espoused by academic anthropologists.   We gain enormous depth of real-world experiences observed directly in consumer households.  Here they are as principles:

1.Pre-screening quads or triads: Conduct a preliminary, highly creative set of 4-8+ small focus groups or triads in several locations, first.  We choose our ethnographic candidates from these groups and gain valuable preliminary insight into motivations, behaviors, and attitudes

2.Rule of 2: Conduct the longer ethnographic observationals in households based upon the scope of 2 per key segment per two regions to read results accurately

3.Direct immersion: Observe at least 8 but better is 12-18+ reality observationals, each of which is 3+ hours long, for at least 36 to 60 hours of observation per study.  If less ethnography is done, findings may be too idiosyncratic or hard to read for definitive insights

4. Only times of natural behavior: Observe households and subjects only during times when behaviors important to the inquiry are likely to exist and occur spontaneously, with little prompting

5. Limit typical indepth interviewing:  Unlike abbreviated forms of garden-variety “talking ethnographies,” authentic ethnographic observationals emphasize minimal staging, prompting, or asking direct questions.  Of the three hours, we try for 2 hours of more spontaneous behavior; we leave an hour at the end of each observational for a formal interview, if necessary, although often all our objectives have been accomplished naturally.  Natural behavior is the most viable form of finding in ethnography

6.Committed client team: Clients are trained in Authentic Ethnography even if team members have already gone on previous ethnographies.  Each client participates in at least two observationals with lead ethnographer, assists with two data-gathering roles

7.Team reinforcement in field:   Prior to each ethnography, the team is refreshed in special observation processes such as  “active invisibility,” “soft gaze,” “gentle presence,” and usage of only open-ended questions

8.Continual ideation:  The lead ehnographer debriefs frequently with client team after each authentic observational, to make sense of intricate findings.  At the conclusion of fieldwork, a creative ideation debrief of 3-4 hours is held back at client headquarters to bring all teams together and share, coalesce, and build on observational findings

9. Digital photography and videography is a key part of process: Households are photographed or videographed extensively by the lead anthropologist, then edited for analysis and presentation. Visuals are as important as language

10.  Synchronicity and serendipity: Although most research analysis uses more traditional clustering of data against key themes, the element of synchronicity and meaningful coindence of observed events, icons, and behavior within households should be included as a-has and insight evolve.

Posted in Archetypes and synchronicity, Ethnography, cultural anthropology, Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research, Synchronicity | No Comments »

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research | No Comments »

I am speculating — on the last day in the office before I’m heading to the upper Amazon basin in Ecuador for vacation and light anthropological research — whether it is possible to experience meaningful coincidences/synchronicity, the identification and evolution of new insights in qualitative research and group/individual creativity, or deep innovative solutions without a period of relaxation inserted somewhere in the creative process.   In the original Osborne creative model that was later redeveloped into new systems like Synectics and Creative Problem Solving, there are creative methodologies based upon four steps:

1. Preparation. A problem or need has been identified and there is intense activity trying to solve it.  New methodologies for creativity are applied.  The team or individual works hard to figure it out.
2. Vacation.  This is the moment when either through an intentional creative exercise that allows one to escape from the problem for a few moments (for instance, the essential paradox is one such Synectics exercise) or to actually go away for a period of time in which the problem is not thought about but the mind is focusing on something else delightful or adventurous.  This allows the brain that has been stimulated in the first preparation stage to recoalesce and reconfigure, unconsciously trying to solve the problem.
3. A-ha.  This stage is when the brain/unconscious has reconfigured the options and comes up with one or more elegant solutions.  Some may work; others may lead to something; others may have a part that is useful.
4. Verification.  This stage is the more analytical one.  The possible solutions are chosen and worked on to optimize.  A final one or two directions is then quantitatively tested or used to begin the new initiative addressing the original problem.

Although the model has many variations and exercises — depending upon whether we are working on a team creativity/vision session  or whether an artist, musician, or designer is working independently on a particular situation — the second stage of vacation appears necessary in order to let the brain power and unconscious archetypal material use all the stimulation and reform the new ideas.

It may be that synchronicity appears most frequently when the subject is in a relaxed state of mind.  However, this hypothesis would bear more investigation.

Nonetheless, while in the jungle and if the paper of the journal does not get too soggy or if the iPad can be plugged in, I will be taking notes of new ideas during this period of environmental change.

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings, Synchronicity | No Comments »

Don’t miss the September Qcast featuring Lindberg speaking on creativity. You can find the QCast on the www.QRCA.org website under September QCast.   I’m speaking on exciting new ways to intensify the power of creativity and brainstorming tactics within four radically different research and creative scenarios — generating marketing ideas with corporate teams, developing new missions and visions with senior management, debriefing research findings after qualitative research with the observational team, and adding archetypal and creative projective techniques to focus groups to gain depth of emotional learning.

Please join me at noon to 1:30 on Thursday, September 6, 2012, eastern standard time

Facilitating Consciously for Breakthrough Insights

September 6, 2012
12:00 p.m. ET (GMT -4)

Speaker: Ava Lindberg, President of SunResearch

Applying the right form of creative facilitation and brainstorming exercises can achieve breakthrough results in qualitative research.  But how do you know what the right form is, when, and how to use it for your particular situation?

Join Ava Lindberg as she shares her top four ways to increase the probability of breakthrough research and conceptual insight using case histories from major brands and other corporate situations.  These approaches are appropriate for:

• Cross-functional brainstorming sessions to develop new concepts and tactics
• Immediate debriefs for innovative co-creation of research findings
• Politically savvy high summits with senior management
• Stimulating creative focus groups using deep projective exercises

Ava Lindberg is President of SunResearch, a leading-edge qualitative research practice located in New York City.  For 20+ years, Lindberg has delved deeply into consumer behaviors, experiential-emotional need states, vision, brand imagery, and creative development as well as spearheaded innovative new forms of qualitative methodologies for leading brands and companies.

Posted in Announcements, Creativity, Methodologies and research findings | No Comments »

This is an article I wrote for an online course in qualitative research in depth psychology…how I feel about doing qualitative research for brands and products.  Qualitative explores the possibilities, identifies the threads of emotions, ties together options within new frameworks, and pushes toward totally innovative insights based upon listening, observing, and understanding real participants describe and experience their lives.

1.0  What is qualitative research?  It is like asking a fish, what is water?   It is the very lifeblood and environment in which I live.   There is a depth of excitement to qualitative research.  It is pure discovery.  It is applied discovery.  It is posing a question and finding out an answer.  It is posing one question and finding out many answers.  It is re-posing the same question in a new angle, and discovering an entire new world.   It is being asked a question by an outside research client and re-problematizing the question in enough ways so that it becomes a true research question that makes the methodology comprehensible.

1.1  Research is evolutionary and involves the sighting, accommodation, and experience of multiple realities colliding at the same time.  The very act of observing an other in order to discover insights and findings is itself a shift in perspective for both the one observing and the one observed; for the researcher, there is a power of process at every level.   It transforms original hopes going into the research when the conclusions don’t match up to the original ideas; it expands one’s destiny as the new results are even more intriguing than the hoped-for data.   All data will eventually fit; we never throw out a piece of data that doesn’t fit immediately, because it may lead to an entirely new thread of insight.  If the deadline is approaching and you put it in the file to think about, keep it alive and place on it a strong mental note to relook it one day under new and different circumstances, like the final report or the final presentation when everything in the study begins to come together.

1.2  Research is diving deep into the big ocean to retrieve a glittering object that shines mysteriously on the bottom floor, far below the surface, then coming up with a ball of seaweed encrusted with new jewels in which a hidden map of an underground universe is revealed.

1.3  Illustrating what the journey of qualitative research is like, I will use archetypal symbols that “found me” in a depth psychological way

• The beginning stage of generative excitement to manifest insights for a new inquiry (see Magician)
• Mixing and blending the right methodologies, design, scope, specifications (see Temperance)
• Figuring out what to do with the new information (see 7 of Pentacles)
• Ordering and reordering data as analysis begins to create a new structure (see 10 of Wands)
• Feeling renewed and more relaxed as insights and findings start coming together in a new way that’s comprehensible; the world has a new order (see Star)
• The exhilaration of success of a project well done, findings discovered, and happily – the research written up and presented (6 of Pentacles)

1.4  There are important differences between qualitative and quantitative research; both have radically opposing characteristics and yet both are needed to understand a universe of research insights.   The stereotype of research as dry, objective, and scientific often comes from quantitative, but qualitative is a whole other experience.    Qualitative can be expansive, while quantitative can be reductive.   Qualitative is divergent, while quantitative is convergent.   Qualitative is explorative and diverse, while quantitative is validation and proof (or a kind of proof).   Qualitative research is the exploration of multiple lines of possibilities leading to the generation of new hypotheses, while quantification is quantifying the extent to which these hypotheses are true, important, or prioritizable in the real world.   Qualitative is a voyage into the unconscious, while quantitative taps into the side of consciousness.

1.5  Qual as the nick-name for qualitative is like appreciating, adoring, pulling apart, turning over, and understanding all the threads of a beautiful Persian carpet – where the threads came from, how they were put together, their value, the philosophical/sacred/belief foundation on which the carpet was created, who created it, who her teacher was, and the archetypal, emotional values behind the carpet’s designs, colors, and patterning.  While, quant as the nick-name for quantitative research is taking that information, quantifying it, and bringing it into a context that makes use of it for a more practical purposes.  Continuing the carpet analogy, we find out how many of these carpets exist, how many people want them, we learn whether the qualitative makes sense in a positioning to numbers of peopl.  We assess which of these hypotheses and pieces of information is actually true for a larger universe than the one originally studied.  Which has value for customers or the end user?  Which piece of information is really important and which of the rest – although interesting – is more anecdotal and idiosyncratic?

1.6  The union of qual and quant when it’s put together for a whole project that moves into the world with definitive results is perhaps analogous to the union of opposites.  Qualitative = receptive, reflective, yin, feminine).   Quantitative = active, evaluative, yang, masculine) in the alchemical process of individuation.

1.7  When one actually conducts qualitative research, the senses are alert and one is in active, concentration…a highly conscious, vital mode.   When one is analyzing qualitative research data, there is thoughtfulness and quiet discipline along with precise ordering and examination, punctuated with flashes of intuition.   When one writes up results, there is a combinatino of high mental focus, more intuition, and creativity, along with depth, brevity, and structure.

1.8  Qualitative findings are frequently contradictory, but with enough puzzling out of the data, looking at it in various angles using different theoretical foundations, putting them together, taking them apart, replacing them into a new schema – the data that is so initially colorful, confusing, chaotic, clear, contradictory, and complex – the 6 Cs of qualitative – begin to create a pattern that is even more beautiful and original.

1.9  Qualitative techniques once were practiced within a more classic, traditional framework of focus groups, mini-groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, but over the past 1-5 years, there has been an almost quantum explosion of new techniques or hybrid forms, such as online qualitative, mobile phone qualitative, performance ethnography, bulletin boards, active participation, co-creation, and a myriad of hybrid forms that push the limits.  They are called by all different names depending upon practitioner.   Some results are groundbreaking and admirable; other techniques end up with findings that, like some conceptual art, do not result in authentic, very new, or comprehensible material although we get a lot of data.  Each project must be customized for the right methodologies.    This enormous shift in qualitative research in the world of professional qualitative market research can be dizzying to both practitioners and clients;  there are so many specialties and everyone is trying everything.

2.0  To better understand the nature of the conscious, the unconscious, the objective and factual, and the deeply emotional and intuitive — a sense of the soul of consumers in all its psyche’s dimensions and possibilities — it’s helpful to approach each new research study with a kind of Zen beginner’s mind.  To identify all the objectives, explore the research considerations, play with new techniques counterbalanced against the classic ones, look at the client needs carefully, check out markets and segments, line up one’s research cohorts, start working on the analysis quickly, schedule debriefs and the final report at the outset, and go into the work with a desire for richness, consistency, experimentation, and evolution.

The next few posts will contain more thinking of the new universe of contemporary qualitative research related to the social sciences like cultural anthropology and depth psychology.

For now, a good metaphor for conducting qualitative research is like being a scientific sleuth — the detective archetype — in a fast-paced novel filled with codes and symbols.  See the Da Vinci Code in a respondent’s library during a recent ethnography.   The Da Vinci Code says something strongly about the character and inclinations of this respondent as it reflects the metphorical nature of qualitative research.

Posted in Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research | No Comments »

Mind-maps are exciting projective devics that can be used for personal creativity, consumer market research, delving deeply or superficially into new associations, expanding and ferreting out an issue, topic, insight, or any starting point.

The technique is deceptively easy.  Take a piece of paper, line up some colored markers, and put your first word or topic on the paper.  You can circle or box the topic in or leave it as is.  Then, draw a line and somewhere put another word that you associate with the original word.  You can put it in a box, circle, or keep it near or on a line.  You can work on that section, and add other associations, making it look somewhat like one side of a leafy tree or cluttery map.  Then, come up with a whole other association that is quite different, and start a whole new line of thought.

Continue this process with words and drawings until the entire page is filled with lines, arrows, words, and small drawings that represent associations of your topic.  Make it juicy, radical, no holds barred.

When done, look at it.  You will be surprised at what you have wrought with comparative facility.

I am in the midst of reading Carl Jung’s (ed. Aniela Jaffe) Memories, Dreams, Reflection — Jung’s last work partially created at the end of his life, then published after his death at age 83.  I was seeking around the internet about the book and discovered this mind-map of Carl Jung’s Memories by Steven Kleon of Steal like an Artist. I am fascinated by the idea of mind-mapping the work of a great theorist or doing one of my own work.  A mind-map could stand as its own work of artunderstanding or morph into something new based upon the totality of one of the associative images or branches of the tree.

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings | No Comments »

Much excitement — a major piece of research has just been written up — it’s for a recent global archetypal research project — and just came out in the new summer issue of QRCA Views, a leading U.S. qualitative research journal.   It’s our collaborative paper presented at the Rome AQR-QRCA biennial conference in April in Rome for Tale of the Script:  A Global Collaborative Adventure.

It’s the story of how I and my fabulous colleague JL conducted — not only ourselves but with the expertise of five international moderators — a series of 24 creative groups to find a global mission for an iconic brand that would charge its new identity with power, coalesce its B2B and consumer divisions, and discover which global regions to concentrate upon in the brand’s thrust for expansion.  Archetypes and projective exercises were a a key part of this international undertaking, which took the better part of summer into fall of 2011.

In another post, I’ll describe the archetypal dimensions and how we did it across the world.   For now, enjoy the article written by the president of the QRCA in Views. Our research could not have been done without the amazing collaboration between members of the research team spanning U.S., Paris, Warsaw, Hamburg, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Delhi, and Mumbai.    Collaboration and interactivity between client teams, researchers, field resources, and target audiences have always excited me, but in 2012, this theme of intentional involvement at all levels of the research has become a critical element of true success.

Posted in Archetypes and synchronicity, Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research | No Comments »

This article could turn into a Ph.D. thesis, so vast is the subject of time.  I’m communicating it here to act as an opening fragment that may require some elaboration in the future.

I have seen no articles on the issue of time within qualitative research  – not on blogs and forums nor at conferences nor is it ever addressed in research training workshops — that time is multifaceted and not to be taken for granted.   But time is a big issue — how we handle it, how we define it, how we use it, and how time uses us.

For us who are working within and against the clock at every moment of a research inquiry, we want to be in the flow, we want open ended time to seek and probe, yet we must stay on time.  Time is chronological, time is perceptual, time as eternal, and as researchers, anthropologists, and psychologists, we face the issue of radical shifts in the experience of time depending upon who is doing the research, who is experiencing the research, when in the research our inquiry begins to open up, and whether it is us, our clients, or the subjects themselves.

Qualitative research often undergoes planning as if time exists in strict chronological order.

Time perceptions affect every aspect of qualitative research because we are going for depth and clarity during an intention process that includes unawareness and confusion from the people we are researching.   And time is required to see truth vs. appearance, sort out resistance from unawareness, and learn when an issue is being answered intellectually vs. emotionally.

Most of our consumers and respondents may never have thought even for a second about the issues we raise during interviews, groups, or ethnography, so all is new to them.

Newness requires time to adjust — for us and for them.

As researchers, we think about and include the time involved when we conduct research methodologies, how much time it takes to understand or explore an insight, the act of creating guides that have explicit timing but finding that they are thrown away and acknowledgment that time changes after the first two or three qualitative experiences.  I often think about how different time feels like for the qualitative researcher-moderator-ethnographer vs. the experience of time with the client team in the backroom, trying to determine in advance or in the process how much time the respondent requires to answer a question, explore an emotion, or do an exercise.

Time seems a material we assume is solid in qualitative research and yet the experience of time shifts radically at multiple points.

We schedule group discussions, say, for 2 hours, indepth interviews for 1 hour, and ethnography for three hours — and yet we find that time allotments for understanding do not conform to time.

Answering a question — it could be very simple as a warm-up or throwaway in a research session —  how do you really feel about sugar in carbonated soft drinks?  about health and wellness in snack foods?   about the emotional experience of spreads on toast?  about life in Canada now that you’ve just arrived from India?  Each simple inquiry could be answered in two minutes or 15 minutes or a day or a year or in eternity as the answer changes from awareness and creates new behavior reflected in upcoming time.

How long does it take for a researcher to understand the issues and be able to communicate the insights with power to herself or to the team or within a report present?  This is a variable that has no answer, but we continue on not realizing that time intersects with eternity at every moment,

We circle back to issues over time.  We hear an idea or behavioral fragment online or in a group, watch body language and eye movements that show something is there  – and when observe our subjects in their homes, that issue expands to a lifetime of perception, behavior, and attitudes.

Allowing ourselves the space to explore and digest the consumer insight expressed within time but emanating from a lifetime of behavior and experiences by the respondent at home — multiplied by many respondents within many methodologies and regions — we grasp time, allow it to remain flexible, and give ourselves permission to exist within a transcendent time frame even as we stay on time, write a report on time, and come to conclusions on chronological time.

Posted in Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research | No Comments »

I am working with a client team on a hybrid qualitative research study (online, then focus groups, then ethnography) related to a consumer packaged goods category, first in Hartford, then Atlanta.   In the midst of this research, in conversation relating to the science and enactment of ethnographic observationals and qualitative research, one of my clients teasingly asks me, “So, what is the strangest research project you’ve ever been on?”

Since there have been many strange and wonderful projects, I pause to think.  Then one study comes to mind:  on fire ants.  It is many years ago.  The work is for a famous insecticide brand, Amdro which is connected to Raid as a subdivision, who needs to develop a creative TV campaign that will intensify motivation to use Amdro and provide clear understanding of how Amdro’s revolutionary bait works against fire ants in the South.

Fire ants are a powerful, insidious, ant nuisance that have come in from Central America, slowly, inexorably.  They are ever spreading, mile by mile, through the south, moving northward.  They only can live in warm weather that does not freeze, but warm weather in the U.S. covers all the South and Southwest.   At that time, the pest is mostly in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and South Georgia areas where we end up doing our research.

The problem with fire ants is manifold.  Fire ant nests are hard to see and easy to step into.  Sometimes they’re almost invisible, appearing and disappearing without notice.  If a young child, unsuspecting adult (drunk or gets out of his car near the side of the road for a quick break), a calf, puppy, or other vulnerable creature steps into a fire ant nest without seeing it, the ants have a maddening, instinctual behavior:  they swarm over the body and then, as if interconnected with a single nerve synapse, begin biting the victim all at the same time.

The bites are extraordinarily painful, sometimes fatal to young animals and children, leave utter burning sensations, horrible pustules stay unhealed all over the body for weeks.  The victim is in misery, requiring hospitalization if severe enough.  The ants live up to their name:  fire.

So, now it’s 15 years later on this refreshment beverage study.  The clients and I are researching outside of Atlanta, in Duluth, GA, and I continue to relate the story that the issue I needed to contend with was to interview farmers and other agricultural people who rarely were seen or interviewed in traditional market research….we set up research stations in location like Stark, Florida, where we recruited fire ant sufferers and set up closed circuit TVs in motel rooms and conference halls to create the research environment that Amdro and agency clients could then observe.

The creative issue, at that time, is interesting, actually.  How to communicate that Amdro as bait would eventually reach the queen of the fire ant nest, kill the queen, which would eventually wipe out the entire nest…when most farmers and landowners were pouring gasoline down the fire ant holes hoping to blow it up violently.   The issue creatively was that when we personified the killing of the queen and the hive in TV ad storyboards, the ants looked cute. The imagery of the ants and queen engendered sympathy and heroism rather than malice and deadliness.  How to un-herocize the queen and the ants?  To solve the creative issues at that time, we used focus groups and an iterative process to work it through.

So, here we are in late March 2012, and I’m talking with altogether different clients about this intriguing subject, who find it rather amusing as a creative problem.  it’s different from their own, but just as hard to figure out.   Not more than three hours later, we do an afternoon ethnography and go out for a run (exercise during authentic ethnography) with a respondent during a real-life observational in Duluth, GA.  As we (the respondent, me, and two clients) all run along a road, we notice mounds of gravel, sand, and small holes at the top of each mound.  The female respondent that the 3 of us are observing says with excitement, “Look!  There!  Fire ant mounds!  They’re dangerous!”  We discuss them quickly, and with amazement.

I can’t believe the fire ant scourge has reached midway into Georgia, near Atlanta.  15 years, farmers and Amdro had predicted it would, and now I’m seeing it.  The northward, spreading course of the nuisance is continuing.

The current clients with whom I have just finished discussing fire ants are astounded to hear about the subject of fire ants from this unsuspecting respondent.  Then, the respondent says, “You know, Amdro bait is the only thing that really kills them….it gets to the heart of the nest, bringing the bait down into the nest to kill the queen.  When the queen is dead, the rest of the ants die.”  Clients hear my words repeated from the mouth of a respondent in the midst of and talking about exercise and cold beverages for hydration and replenishment.

To me… It’s obvious that the TV campaign we developed for Amdro 15 years ago worked in terms of communication with education–since the education on how fire ants can be eradicated through Amdro bait is crystal clear to this respondent.

I am left with wonder.

As an observer of synchronicity, I am thinking to myself now that I’m back from this particular piece of research:  What does fire ant mean, more universally?  Is it just a coincidence?  Is it potentially a meaningful coincidence?  Why does the sight of these nests return into my experience?  What is the meaning of conquering pests through bait?  Is the fact that the educative effect works from the Amdro campaign…the reason?   What about Amdro anyhow?

What is the symbolic, archetypal, metaphorical, metaphysical meaning of ant?   Ants?   Fire ants?

Posted in Creativity, Ethnography, cultural anthropology, Methodologies and research findings, Synchronicity | No Comments »