From the Library of Quick Study, April 2024
Would you rather trust stats or vibes?
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Let’s start here:
Alexa and I were asked recently if we call the research we do qual or quant. The answer, as it should be for strategists, is both! Sometimes you need to be in the world talking to people and catching vibes, like last fall when we spent time visiting 18 malls across America talking to customers and retail employees. But vibes do not a strategy make on their own, which is why we always back our research with quantifiable data that either we produce through custom surveys and questionnaires, or that we find out in the world. The danger to not triangulating your research is missing something that could be interesting and drives the strategy forward. That’s where vibes can come in and help arm the stats with a story worth telling.
This month’s From the Library touches on a side-effect of all this: how do we balance what we know with what we feel? Let’s head to the stacks.
Knowledge-induced Negativity
It’s an age-old dinner table discussion: would you rather be smart and sad or dumb and happy? There’s actually research on this, and US adults are about 50/50 on the topic, although men would rather be smart and sad, and women would rather be dumb and happy.
While that question is a fascinating one, I think a more up-to-date version is causing lots of consternation in culture right now: would you rather believe stats or vibes? Statistically, flying is safer than it’s ever been. Vibes-wise, “If it’s Boeing, I’m not going” is pretty damn catchy.
As Charlie Warzel pointed out in The Atlantic, vibes have a tendency to win this argument because they create a flywheel of coverage statistics can’t: “An uptick in interest in stories about airline mishaps can lead to an increase in coverage of airline mishaps, which has the effect of making more routine issues feel like they’re piling up.” For lack of a better term, we enter a vibe-spiral and all of a sudden we lose perspective.
Let’s unpack a connected example. Some airlines use buses to service shorter “flights” (so maybe you fly to Philadelphia but then your connecting flight to Atlantic City is actually a bus). A TikToker experienced this phenomenon in a post from early March. Among the comments are many jokes about Boeing that infer the bus trip will be safer. Those comments are then followed by others making the point that, statistically, flying is much safer than being in a car or bus. That may be true, but to many people the vibes say otherwise!
Another prevalent vibe these days is that the internet has never been worse when it comes to its general toxicity. But recent studies, as reported on by Caitlin Dewey, have found that the internet has kind of always been a consistent size of trash heap. Stats and vibes clash again as perception becomes reality. “Overall, the study found that the prevalence of both toxic speech and highly toxic users were extremely low,” Caitlin wrote. “But the longer any conversation goes on, on virtually any platform, the more toxic it becomes. At the same time, conversations tend to involve fewer, more active participants as they stretch on.” Which leads us to…
Internet Migratory Patterns
As we just learned, the longer any conversation goes on, the more toxic it becomes, which is why there’s a growing opinion that the grand experiment that is “social media” has peaked. As Ryan Broderick put it in Garbage Day, “...it’s probably time to accept that we have reached the limitations of the social web as it’s currently constructed.” This is not to be conflated with a peaking of the internet itself, but a commentary on how the ways people use the internet and where they spend their time on it are changing. TikTok may be banned, but even if it isn’t it was already peaking and/or aging up according to various studies. Sports Twitter, once one of the best examples of the platform’s usefulness, is slowly fading away. Reddit has gone public, but beef with its own moderators will continue on and potentially impact its long-term value. Mr. Beast has spent months courting a TV deal that he can now use to further diversify his content delivery without being purely reliant on YouTube. Not even our love of love is helping - the sentiment around dating apps has hit a wall. One question we can’t answer quite yet: Has social media truly begun to slide toward becoming a footnote in the long story of the internet, or is it just that the people dominating the commentary on social media are getting old and exhausted by its ever-evolving nature? It’s Warzel’s flywheel of vibes all over again.
Of course…
Vibes vs. stats is not black & white. Brands need strategies that can balance both in ways their audiences will appreciate. For example, nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake can’t be the answer. Neither can simply calling your consumers a community. The best strategies balance qual and quant so that the vibes are backed by truth from stats, and vice versa. When all the information is on the table, unique opportunities for storytelling will rise to the top.
Until next time!
The Other 90 is written by Rob Engelsman, a former baby model and now Cofounder & Strategy Partner at Quick Study. To find out more about how we help brands and agencies get to smarter plans faster, email rob@quick.study. You can also find Quick Study on LinkedIn.