Future Predictions: We Are Now Entering The New Age Of Meaning.

This piece was written for the RBDR Future Predictions 2015/16 special issue with MR Influencers.

We Are Entering The New Age Of Meaning.

Data is no longer the sole answer to everything. We are drowning in data. Data have become the ubiquitous noise, which paralyses our ability to think clearly and make the right decisions: as organisations and as ourselves. In many ways, Market Research as an industry is doing the very opposite of what it should be doing. It creates more noise. It’s churning out more data every day in hope to interpret the data that is already out there.

Moreover, for the past six decades MR has been so busy counting statistics, it had lost track with what it was counting. Numbers can’t predict the future, as they can’t deal with uncertainty. The only thing that can deal with uncertainty is meaning, because it’s deeply engrained in our human nature. Meaning is critical to our human existence, as without meaning any activity is purposeless. The ability of abstraction and thinking in symbolic patterns is what makes us human, after all.

Our quest for meaning will never go away, it simply can’t. People will always wonder about what the meaning of (their) life is. And as Victor Frankl had succinctly put it once “turns out…