Mirror, Mirror- Contemplations on Qualitative Market Research

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest of Them All?

Peering intently at the you from this side of the 2-way mirror, I am Id staring down Ego. It never ceases to amaze how quickly you forget, despite frequent reminders, that the barrier between us is a window and not a wall.  A thin reflective surface is all it takes, and the only thing you see is yourself, out of the corner of your eye.  I’m intrigued, suspicious of the illusion,when you stare directly back at me; but within seconds, with a twitch, a tilt of the head, you betray that you were looking at your own image all along. 

Angel or demon, I hover behind the interviewer, sifting every nuance, noting responses and lines of inquiry, willing this or that to change to shift, all to make you comfortable, to establish rapport, to elicit your response in this artificial environment.  It delights and frightens me that we can create friends out of strangers just by setting them opposite an interviewer at a table, that given the right questions and a few common experiences, alliances and enmity can develop so quickly and then  scatter like quicksilver when the conditions behind the glass are broken.  This could be a good dinner conversation, a cocktail party, a bad argument between a married couple- except that the people in this room have known each other for only twenty minutes, and in another twenty they will slip out of this room and into the world, and they may never speak again of this to anyone.  It undermines my faith in the strength of human bonds and ties, as slippery as an image sliding over glass.

You have no idea what I look like, but I’ve stared at you intently enough to fall in love with you, a little.  It’s funny what happens when you train yourself to listen with no judgements, soaking up the messages of the body and intonation.  All the little worries and endearing fallibilities, the thread of the divine, and seeping patches of evil come through that image of yourself that you see on the mirror.  I’ve known qualitative researchers who were so practiced at their art that they could tell you how your grandmother died, the name of your daughter’s barge, the reasons you lived in Siberia, and delve right into the one soul-wrenching experience you had in common, just by exploring the frequencies of pitch and tone for 5 minutes in a telephone conversation.  And when we look into your irises? We can see through your own two way mirror, right through the crystal lenses you carry with you in your head, to the other side of that miniscule glass and the inverted image of the world it carries..

I’ve sent the interviewer in to take you through the forest of your doubts, to steal your heart and bring it back for my inspection.  What are your motivations?  Your needs, wants, dreams and disappointments? It feels like stealing, as careless as murder. I’d like to stay on this side of your mind’s eye for longer, see what you do with this conversation, whether you take anything out of this room with you, or whether the reason you came here was to leave it all here, a burden shed.  In the meantime, I will hoard every word, and serve it on a plate to be savored or devoured.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest of Them All?

You Are….

10:05:03 PM