McPhee Goes Beyond the Rational

Neil McPhee, formerly Head of Qualitative Research at Morpace International, has opened a new qualitative consultancy, Nuance Research. Nuance aims to offer cost-effective research in both b2b and b2c markets, and to get beyond 'rational and rationalised questions' to the unconscious roots of consumer choice.

Nuance opened its doors at the end of May 2003 and has already completed several projects. Specialist areas are in b2c - financial, fmcg, telecoms and services - and b2b markets, and project types will include npd, communications evaluation and customer needs work, plus direct marketing research.

McPhee has been in qualitative research for over 30 years and was MD of MSS Research before joining Morpace. Clearly looking forward to taking a different approach as a smaller agency, he says that 'The research market is polarising between the very big agencies, with their benefits of great capacity, but low attention from their most senior people, and the smaller ones, where in-depth involvement from the most experienced practitioners is the key, at costs that the larger agencies cannot match'.

He also sees opportunities in 'filling the gap' left by methodologies over-dependent on straight questions about reasons for purchasing behaviour, which he thinks fail to get at the real reasons for it. 'Competitive advantage comes from better, more insightful understanding of how and why consumers - both b2c and b2b - make the decisions that they do. All the available evidence suggests that most decisions are taken unconsciously, thus asking rational and rationalised questions will not achieve the necessary understanding'.

Neil can be contacted at Nuance Research, on 0117 330 7695 or 077 14 15 22 11, and at neil@nuance-research.co.uk

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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