CultureLabel

We’ve already noted how better understanding the consumer is critical to the success of cultural entrepreneurship. Market research can be used to identify the needs of consumers, as well as predicting how the market may receive a new product or service. However, many cultural entrepreneurs view formal market research with suspicion. Perhaps rightly so.

Many of the entrepreneurs interviewed for this research had attempted some form of research before implementing ideas, including ethnographic research and commissioning independent agencies. They were often also actively encouraging their clients to engage in market research, promoting the benefits of ‘results-driven’ design and marketing, for example. Despite this, the consensus was to consider the value of formal market research as limited.

One highly successful entrepreneur, for example, argued that, “if you do too much consultation, you’ll end up with the lowest common denominator.” Judging its value in helping him make decisions about implementation, he says that he would “only do it out of interest rather than to be driven by it.” Another entrepreneur shrewdly pointed out that often the cultural entrepreneur is ahead of the market, and consequently, the market may not be able to visualise future innovations, so may not respond favourably. For him, market research “points you in the right direction, but it doesn’t answer all the questions.” Ultimately, it is the entrepreneur’s responsibility to make decisions: “It’s important to listen to what the clients want, but you’ve always got to be in control of your own destiny.” For many, “just believing in” a product is as important as “objective” research.

The ‘new’ market research

To replace formal market research, cultural entrepreneurs advocate a heightened state of sensory awareness. This enhances the argument of Banks et al, who suggest that cultural entrepreneurs replace market research and plans with the insurance of their own intuitive sense of being ‘cutting edge’ and creatively strong.

Informal conversations and daily interactions help to gather useful information formerly provided by formal market research. Keeping up to date with the media, for example, means “every day is research.” Technology has made such informal research much easier, bringing a huge range of information onto the computer desktop of the cultural entrepreneur: “Seeing as I spend a lot of time on my PC… you’re right next to Google, so you see what’s going on.”

Whilst in part this attitude results from a lack of time and money for market research, for many it is a conscious strategy. ‘Just doing’ a scaled-down version of an enterprise constitutes an excellent form of hands-on ‘research’: “We thought that setup and infrastructure costs to get it off the ground would be cheaper than actually researching it to see if it was viable or not… We just let it run for a while, and then pulled it, because that was the research.”