Andrew Wiseman has been thinking about snobbery. From indie bands and craft beer, to AI and ‘discovery sessions’, he wonders whether researchers have become a bit too obsessed with the shiny new thing, and forgotten that sometimes the old stuff works perfectly well.
I’m just back from Leeds Festival 2026. I had a great time, thanks for asking.
I saw some bands I knew, some I’d heard of and some that were completely new to me. This isn’t a humble brag about seeing Gurriers before they go massive. Or Tooth while they’re still largely under the radar.
It’s actually a blog about snobbery.
It was Sunday afternoon, about 4.30, just before the absolutely biblical thunderstorm came along. If you were there, you know.
Some of our party wanted to go and see Sombr. Now, it’s not really my thing, but I can absolutely see the attraction. He’s got great stage presence, catchy songs and clearly knows what he’s doing. I just didn’t really fancy it.
When people ask me that annoying question, “What kind of music do you like?”, I never really know what to say. I like loads of different stuff. If I had to categorise myself, though, I’d probably say I’m an indie kid. When I was growing up, indie actually meant something had been released on an independent label. These days it seems to mostly mean bands with guitars, so we’ll go with that.
There were a couple of bands on that I could go and see, and I mentioned that I might pop my head in to see The Lilacs. This was met with some incredulity. “Why are you going to see indie poo?”.
Indie poo? It wasn’t a phrase I’d heard before, but apparently it’s been doing the rounds on TikTok to describe fairly derivative, Oasis-ish bands.
Oasish? Anyway. I’m not the world’s biggest Oasis fan, but it did make me laugh slightly. Oasis themselves weren’t exactly created in a musical vacuum. They’ve always been pretty open about The Beatles and The Stone Roses being huge influences. Frankly, which band is truly original these days?
I went to see The Lilacs anyway. I left after one song. Not because they were “indie poo”. I just wasn’t that into it, so I went to see Gurriers instead. Who, if I haven’t mentioned it already, were absolutely brilliant.
The whole thing got me thinking about musical snobbery. My cup of tea might not be yours. That’s fine. You get it everywhere. Craft beer nerds taking the piss out of Foster’s drinkers. I’m not going to drink Foster’s either, to be fair, but somebody’s Amber Nectar is somebody else’s idea of beer hell. Not everyone wants the latest artisanal smoothie IPA brewed with kumquats and irony. Different folks. Different strokes.
So, what on earth has this got to do with market research?
Quite a lot, actually. There’s always a clamour in our industry for something new. Something shiny. Something digital. Something AI-powered, obviously. Nothing wrong with that.
We use plenty of new tools ourselves, and some of them are genuinely brilliant. The problem comes when the method starts becoming a status symbol. When using something new somehow makes the research more sophisticated. Focus groups? Bit old fashioned. Telephone interviewing? Christ, are we still doing that? Desk research? Far too dull. Better call it an audit. A workshop? No thanks. We’re having a discovery session.
Stick a few Post-it notes on a wall, give the process a proprietary-sounding name and suddenly everyone feels a bit more innovative. There are probably 101 examples. Some of them have really wanky titles. The question I’ve always cared about is much simpler: Does it make the research better?
If AI helps us get somewhere quicker, spot something we might otherwise have missed or analyse something at a scale we couldn’t realistically manage before, brilliant. If gamification gets people more engaged and gives us better data, fantastic. If a new platform lets people show us something they couldn’t easily explain in a focus group, great. Innovation with a purpose is a good thing.
Innovation because everyone else is talking about it, or because it makes the methodology slide look sexier, is something else entirely. Sometimes the best way to understand something is still to sit six people around a table and have a proper conversation with them. Sometimes picking up the phone is still the right answer. Sometimes desk research is just desk research. That doesn’t make any of those things less sophisticated. It just means the method is doing its job.
Maybe that’s the research version of musical snobbery. We become so keen to demonstrate that we know about the newest thing that we start looking down on (or reframing / renaming) perfectly good traditional stuff because it isn’t fashionable anymore. Sometimes you need the weird experimental band playing to 40 people on the smallest stage. Sometimes Oasis will do. The important thing is whether anyone actually wants to listen to it.
At Mustard, we don’t start with the methodology. We start with the question you’re trying to answer, the people you need to understand and the decision the research needs to inform. Sometimes that means something new. Sometimes it means something that has been working perfectly well for decades. If you’re planning a research project and want to work out what approach will make the biggest difference, get in touch.