Another common mistake in Insight Community onboarding is moving forward before internal alignment is fully established.

For a successful launch, stakeholders need to be clear on:

• The primary purpose of the Community.
• The type of customer insight required.
• The priority audiences.
• How success will be measured.

If some of these things are not worked out, you risk building something that looks good, but doesn’t deliver strategic value.

How we fix it

Before onboarding begins, we work closely with relevant teams, such as insight, marketing, innovation and CX to clarify:

• What business decisions will this Community influence?
• What hypotheses are we hoping to test?
• What segmentation is essential?
• What does success look like in 6-12 months?

This clarity informs everything from recruitment criteria and profiling design to engagement planning.

Insight Communities should never feel like “research for research’s sake.”

When asked about the impact mentoring has had, both spoke about something deeper than skills or progression.

Sarah reflected on how many talented women underestimate themselves. “I have mentored some incredible women who have a totally unjustified low opinion of their abilities,” she notes. “They’re their own worst critic.”

Francesca found reassurance in discovering that many challenges aren’t unique. “It’s been a reminder that most challenges you face, others have faced too and found a way around,” she says. “There is so much we can learn from other people’s stories.”

Beyond individual growth, mentoring strengthens workplace culture.

“Conversations between women of different ages and career stages are incredibly valuable,” Sarah explains. “It makes the working environment more empathetic and builds a more supportive culture.”

Francesca agrees, especially when the mentor brings an experienced but detached perspective. “That clarity helps brainstorm solutions and stretch your thinking.”

When we create space for honest conversations, everyone benefits.

True empathy isn’t about guessing what customers might need. It comes from involving neurodivergent individuals directly in research and service design.

Too often, customer experience frameworks are built on assumptions made by neurotypical teams, then retrofitted with “inclusive” language once issues arise. This reactive approach risks perpetuating the very empathy gap organisations are trying to close.

Market research has a critical role to play here. Inclusive research design, such as offering multiple ways to participate, allowing additional processing time and avoiding overly abstract questioning can surface insights that would otherwise be missed.

Neurodivergent participants often provide highly detailed, specific feedback when given the right conditions, offering a depth of understanding that benefits all customers, not just those with diagnosed conditions.

Sometimes you don’t have weeks or months to wait for answers.

Insight Communities allow brands to tap into customer perspectives quickly and in real time without additional project set-up time and cost.

Ideas can be tested, assumptions challenged and emerging issues or questions explored while decisions are still being shaped internally. It provides you the option to directly interact with your customers in a dialogue or to create discussion topics for them to talk to other users allowing you to “listen in”.

Speed also doesn’t mean shallowness. Brands can follow up, ask why and turn fast feedback into meaningful learnings.

You would have to be hiding under a rock not to have noticed how AI-generated content is seeping into what we watch. Whether it’s TV and online advertising, cutaway shots in TV shows and movies or deep-fakes – which range from the benign to the sinister. What’s of particular interest is that there is little desire or demand among viewers, or consumers, for this type of content, and it is this that leads us to the second trend likely to push further to the surface in 2026: authenticity as a premium content asset. When so much is fake, it’s perhaps unsurprising that content which is genuine and authentic will stand out. Storytelling that lays bare the messy idiosyncrasies of human behaviour will cut through. Micro-moments that get you right in the feels will be cinema.  

Again, this is an area that The Traitors excels. While there is edited drama around key moments, it is also a brilliant petri dish of real, genuine human behaviour. The missteps, the mistakes, the micro moments of joy, frustration and connection – it’s all there. We love Stephen because we all recognise the panic and fear that come with performed identities. Those of us that aren’t great in group situations empathise with Jade as she negotiates misplaced pile-ons. We put ourselves in James’s shoes and query whether, in the same situation, we would have stolen the shield.  

Who wins on The Traitors is ultimately secondary to the show’s character-driven narration. Overly manufactured TV is so 2016. 2026 will be the year of magnetic, character-driven, authentic content.  

What we’re seeing is not a simple retreat from consumption, but a creeping polarisation in behaviour – one that I’d like to compare with my own New Year’s resolution: Champagne sobriety.

For those outside the loop, this is the rule whereby you will only drink alcohol when champagne is an option. It reduces what could be a daily or weekly habit into a luxury-led moment of consumption, through basic necessity.

More importantly, it straddles the be seen in the now end of the spectrum, where larger and more significant social occasions are typically celebrated with a bottle of bubbles, and the live your best life for longer mentality, with which regular or excessive alcohol consumption is at odds.

Frustration to fulfilment

Evie’s experience was not an isolated one. Over time, this brand saw a drop in response rates and fewer members taking part with the same enthusiasm. It became clear that something about the experience wasn’t landing. Acknowledging the disconnect, the team took steps to rebuild trust and re-engage their Community. They introduced a ‘Your impact’ hub with short updates on how research was shaping decisions, as well as monthly newsletters and personalised ‘thank you’ messages at the end of activities. Video ‘thank yous’ from the brand’s insight team to members, and sneaky peeks of what was going on behind the scenes, meant members started to feel like they were part of something special.

It didn’t transform engagement overnight, but these small, but meaningful changes helped reignite enthusiasm among members. Engagement began to improve and the Community gradually became a more reliable feedback channel that informed future planning.

For members like Evie, the experience shifted from feeling like a one-sided effort to a rewarding partnership.

The bottom line

When Insight Community members feel heard and valued, they’re more than participants. They become brand advocates and collaborators. Closing the feedback loop isn’t simply just sharing research results. It’s about building trust, a deeper connection and showing that every voice matters. By establishing this two-way communication, brands can build lasting relationships and loyalty, that manifest into a successful Community.

For our team, the future of AI in market research feels both transformative and uncertain. While there’s an expectation that AI might automate some or all of tasks like fieldwork, project design and analysis – potentially shifting the researcher’s role to more of a consultant or manager – it also raises significant concerns about the future of jobs and specialism in our profession.

A major concern about AI’s role in research is the potential for stunted professional growth among junior team members, who might miss out on developing foundational skills if they never need to pore through open-ends or dig through data tables.

Admittedly, the original post did question what proportion of the £45m the research work could take credit for. But what it didn’t do, was flip the idea of ROI on its head.

In my opinion, the ROI from market research should be a little blurry. Consumer insight when injected into a business should feed through the veins of the organisation, stopping off at various internal organs and spending time where needed.

The timeline for this can be within a day, week, month or even decade. The path from data to decision makers isn’t always linear, immediate, or clear. Think of it in terms of the butterfly effect, rather than a cold cash transaction. It often snowballs, with small pieces of information remembered, stored and used later when push comes to shove. Research which has been shelved or disregarded at one moment may be picked up, dusted off and referred to later, like books in a library.

While I have become well acquainted with Excel over the past year, research is just as much about people as it is about numbers. Whether you’re running focus groups or analysing survey data, you’re digging into human behaviour, opinions and motivations.

And no two days are ever the same. One week I was packing 400 bags of sweets for a taste test; the next, I was deep in a discussion room thread about people’s opinions on loo roll. Now that’s variety.