Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a great talk for the QRCA International Chapter series delivered by Hadley Coull, founder of Headz.
I have been lucky enough to know Hadley for ten years and consider him a good friend, and his session on how we build brands in an increasingly metric-driven world was incredibly thought-provoking.
Based on my notes from the session, I wanted to share a summary of the key points Hadley made, along with a few of my own reflections on how this impacts our work in the insights industry.
The Dashboard vs The Human Experience
Hadley highlighted a tension that is becoming increasingly visible, particularly in the tech, media, and gaming sectors, where relationships are heavily mediated by digital media. A lot of modern brand behaviour feels procedural, cold, and excessively transactional. Our attention, as users or consumers, is often treated simply as a resource to be harvested by the system.
The core of the issue is a fundamental misalignment: organisations run on optimisation logics, but brands run on relationship logics. Optimisation logic is procedural, easy to measure, and therefore metrics driven; but as a result, brands are falling into the trap of trying to satisfy the dashboard rather than the human experience. They optimise for metrics like click-through rates rather than the actual outcome they are supposed to measure, meaning the business starts valuing only what it can measure.
Hadley referenced the game designer Soren Johnson, who famously noted that players will often “optimise the fun out of a game”. There is a real risk that organisations are doing the exact same thing to their brands. There is no malice or incompetence behind this; it is just a logic that has become incredibly dominant. The dashboard might show that numbers are going up and short-term performance is working, but the brand’s strength is being eroded because something inherently human is being neglected in the process.
The Value of “Inefficiency”
Crucially, Hadley pointed out that things that look inefficient on paper sometimes do the most important work. Taking the time for a barista to chat with a customer at a cafe might not look efficient on a spreadsheet, but it is vital for nurturing the brand relationship.
To combat this, we must remember that some truths become experientially visible before they become statistically legible. Brand thinking needs to become a decisional architecture that makes space for relationships inside systems that normally prioritise measurable truths.
My Take: The Impact on the Insights Industry
Reflecting on Hadley’s brilliant points, it is clear to me that this exact tension trickles down to every level of business, including our own industry.
In qualitative research, there is a growing tendency for end clients and stakeholders to push for highly measurable elements of the research process. Procurement often tends to be overly focused on the sheer numbers of participants, the speed of analysis, or the quantifiable value per interview.
When we optimise research purely for speed and volume, we completely miss the ability to catch those relational nuances that make relationships, including the ones brands have with their own consumers, so special.
While our industry should be focused on deep interpretation and understanding, the pressure to optimise threatens to turn insight into just another transaction. If we want to help brands build real relationships, we have to protect some space for the unmeasurable nuances that truly matter.
