Time to get back to reality
Meet Dose of Reality
Today, we are launching Dose of Reality.
There is a problem we’ve been thinking about for a while. In fact, grandiose as it sounds, we believe it’s one of the biggest challenges businesses, and perhaps society, currently faces.
Businesses have never had more data about customers. And yet, in many ways, businesses, brands, and policy-makers are further away from real people than ever before. We see this play it out across many aspects of life, from government failure to major brand missteps.
The Reality Gap is here and it’s getting bigger with every new synthetic persona that is created, with every brand that cuts real people out of its thinking, and every time we think it’s too inconvenient or expensive to actually bother to chat to real people.
The truth is, we all know the best way of really understanding people - bridging the gaps between us that seem to be getting bigger and bigger - is by talking with them. Not just giving them a 5 minute survey to complete, tracking their online clicks or monitoring their bank transactions. But by taking the time to really understand their underlying attitudes, motivations, and beliefs.
‘Taking the time’ being the crux of the issue.
It takes time to understand real people. And time means money. Ethnographic research is invaluable, but to get the depth AND scale on a reasonable budget? Impossible.
That’s what Dose of Reality tries to solve. To really understand what’s going on in people’s lives across Britain, or dare we say the world.
So, what actually is Dose of Reality?
Dose of Reality is a one-stop portal that gives you what you need to truly understand the people you are trying to serve.
It combines hundreds of hours of real footage of real people with true behavioural data, giving our clients direct access to the reality of people’s lives across the UK.
Whether you want to understand why people really buy own-brand instead of branded products from supermarkets; how preparation for Christmas is changing this year vs last year for 18-30 year olds living in rural areas, or what times of the week specific cohorts wake up, and in what mood - through combining qualitative research and real behavioural data, we can answer those questions instantly.
And much more besides.
Okay, but why should I read this newsletter?
We are on a mission that extends beyond the product we are building. We want to help people like you get closer to the people they are trying to serve.
This publication is where we will share what we are seeing. What’s really going on in people’s lives.
The excitement, the expectations.
The concerns, the contradictions.
The joy, the sadness, the rational used to justify the emotional.
The product choices, the fridges, the stats and the depth.
We want to be useful for businesses trying to make better decisions about people.
So we’ll share these Reality Signals: careful, anonymised observations from real conversations and visits around the UK, showing what people are thinking, feeling, worrying about, ignoring, watching, buying, rejecting and quietly changing.
We’ll show how better access to real lives can improve research, strategy, planning, creative development and brand decision-making.
We’ll also write about why real human understanding matters in a world of synthetic shortcuts.
And we’ll share what we’re learning as we build the platform: the product decisions, the tensions, the questions, the mistakes, the progress and the choices behind the business.
Some of it will be about research.
Some of it will be about AI.
Some of it will be about Britain.
Some of it will be about brands.
But all of it will come back to the same belief:
if you want to truly understand people, you cannot remove them from the process.
We want to help you ensure real people are at the heart of your thinking.
Register your interest
The product is on its journey to deliver what’s in our heads.
The MVP is being built right now.
So if you are a strategist, planner, agency leader, marketer, researcher, investor, founder, journalist, or anyone else interested in the future of human insight, we’d like you to follow what comes next.
You can register your interest to hear when early access opens.
You can also subscribe here to keep reading what we learn, what we see, and what we think the industry needs to confront.
Because the future of research should not be a race to create more convincing synthetic people.
It should be a better way to listen and learn from real people, to deliver you Reality AdvantageTM.
Mark Hadfield and James Addlestone
Co-founders, Dose of Reality
Really excited to be getting going