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Diverse viewpoints, or misunderstanding? The importance of double checking the perspective.

I’m not a lover of Scrabble. Or word games. I find them quite tedious.

Wordle is a great lockdown phenomenon and it’s become quite a thing for my family and their friends.

During our recent San Francisco holiday I assiduously avoided playing, leaving them to it, as I had plenty of other distractions.

The second week of my trip (which had turned into work) and finding myself on my own with long nights in hotel rooms, uninclined to sit in restaurants on my own I gave it a go. It was a good distraction. I even worked out how to do the previous, daily versions of it, I was that bored. So, I was chuffed at achieving 26 solutions in a few days and soon reached a reasonable average guess number.

On the last morning of my trip, 8 hours behind the daily UK release, I saw in the family chat that my husband had solved a particularly difficult word. Having failed that day, the kids wanted hints, so he shared the answer.

My chance to score a ‘solved it in 1’ I thought. So, I got straight to it, dropping in the word of the day, Vivid. Boom!

But no. Even using his other words, I didn’t manage to solve it, so I again resorted to my own devices.

I later shared my screen shot complaining, thinking it must have been down to US spelling. But no. It turned out I’d downloaded an app that did the same thing, with a similar name (Wordly), but I was playing with a completely different set of words.

It turns out our regular family conversations, deliberately avoiding the details, the specifics, the spoilers meant that we were on completely different platforms. We felt we were on the same wavelength, doing things together, but we were miles away (and not just literately).

I am not up to speed on everything that was covered in the five South by Southwest conference themes, but I did see there was ‘The Power of Inclusivity’ track setup to deal with tackling the difficulty in incorporating diverse viewpoints. It made me wonder how often such issues are caused by not clarifying each party’s understanding of their start point or double checking the tools they’re using before running off in different directions, just like I did with Wordle.

The importance of sharing the same alignments and definition of industry terms with clients (or colleagues) shouldn’t be underestimated when trying to comprehend diverse viewpoints.

Understanding diverse perspectives, experiences and audiences are a constant fascination for us. I’ll be interested to hear what methods attendees of the SXSW track learn too.

Author

Jane Hales is the co-founder of the award-winning Sapio Research. Sapio Research is a full-service, quantitative and qualitative market research company supporting Agencies and Brands to make confident decisions or achieve extraordinary headlines. They do this through their ABC process: Audience, Brand and Content Research.

Sapio Research Join ICCO as New Partner for 2022

Sapio Research is an award-winning, international full-service market research consultancy and has joined ICCO as Research Partners for 2022. Sapio offers quantitative and qualitative research, welcoming complex, challenging briefs. They can help to formulate the approach, to create the scope and design the process. This is done through ABC: Audience understanding, Brand research and Content research.

Jane Hales, Co-Founder and Director, Sapio Research said:

“I am delighted Sapio has become ICCO’s new exclusive research partner, this is an endorsement of our excellent relationship with the PR industry and ability to deliver Audience, Brand and Content Research. We look forward to working with ICCO and their member agencies around the world to deliver valuable work in 2022, including the World PR Report later in the year”.

Rob Morbin, Deputy Chief Executive, ICCO said

“Adding Sapio Research to ICCO’s roster of recommended partners will support our members around the world by offering quality, precise research with an international outlook. Facts and evidence are the cornerstone of good communication and quality research allows our members to develop storylines and decisions with confidence”

To find out more please contact Jane Hales, Co-Founder and Director, jane.hales@sapioresearch.com