WTF is going on with Britain's Heartland? (Post 1)
POST 1: THE OVERVIEW
Last week we were lucky enough to be down in that there sunny London, in Chancery Lane, when Saatchi & Saatchi and Richard Huntington launched their new piece of research: “What the fuck is going on with Britain’s Heartland?”
And it’s our privilege to be one of their research partners for a brilliant piece of work. It follows on from last year’s inaugural study.
And with the blessing of the clients, like last year, I wanted to share an overview of the project. Thank you Saatchi & Saatchi for letting me share the content in the below and subsequent posts.
If you want to find out more about Saatchi & Saatchi’s brilliant piece of work, contact them here.
Sharing our Research in 3 parts
There’s a lot we’re sharing, and we’ll do it in three parts:
POST 1: This newsletter will cover THE OVERVIEW of the research.
POST 2: A deep dive into A THEME we unearthed including participant content.
POST 3: We’ll touch on an homage to Tony Parker - our ORAL HISTORY book.
The Starting Point
Last year’s project was hugely enjoyable and successful. It was covered on TV, in the mainstream press and garnered a lot of discussion and debate in the industry too.
For ‘WTF 24’ we discussed several options:
Do we visit the same people and see if, and how, their views have changed?
Do we follow the same methodology of ‘pot luck’ recruitment?
Do we set some boundaries on who we visit? And if so, what boundaries, and why…
We liked the ‘rawness’ of WTF 2023 recruitment - recruitment that wasn’t too overly designed and screeners that weren’t too prescriptive.
In one of our chats we talked about the fact that lots of the mainstream press cover at length the ‘working class’ or people toward the lower end of the socio-demographic scale, and also touch a lot on the ‘upper class’ too. Two extremes, typically covered with extreme headlines - either extreme riches or extreme poverty. But what about those in the middle?
So we started discussing the concept of the ‘middle classes’ - those who we felt weren’t rich enough to be insulated from choppy economic waters, but who weren’t quite queuing at Food Banks. Probably your customers. The Heartland.
The Methodology
Who are the ‘middle classes’? How are they defined? How should we define them?
We spent a long time on this, and eventually decided to keep it very simple. Richard goes into detail in the Saatchi & Saatchi book, but in essence, we said “people who earn their income via working (they don’t earn it from inert assets), who earn between £30,000 - £125,000, and pay tax on their salaries”.
When we agreed on that definition (I can hear the naysayers oiling their keyboards from here…) it was a case of discussing with recruiters how we could achieve a blend of geographic locations, genders, ethnicities and ages without being overly-prescriptive.
We ended up meeting the people below throughout April 2024, and in numerical order (we visited Carole and Adrian in the last few days of March for the detail seekers…)
For each we spent 3-5 hours in their homes - the time fluctuations highlighting the organic nature of spending time in people’s homes - their routines, errands, rituals and openness all being slightly different.
We had a broad Discussion Guide that touched on some specifics the agency wanted to cover (perfect content for their clients and their new business drive!) but the ‘centres of gravity’ of all conversations with the participants moved around broad themes:
Their sense of self
Their home and what the concept of home means to them
Their family setup
Their work
Their money
Their lives now - stresses, strains, hopes and fears
Their thoughts on politics
Their thoughts on the terms ‘working class’, ‘middle class’ and ‘upper class’
Capturing the Feeling
When we are privileged to spend time in people’s homes, we use different technologies to try and capture their reality. Yet not one medium is perfect.
So we’re constantly exploring the best way to communicate what we actually feel in people’s homes.
We shared the below Bio Overviews for each visit. Words and images to bring our time with our participants to life. A theme that we felt was a big ‘headline’ from our time with them. A setting that tried to encapsulate the visit experience itself. Then a mini biography and a selection of short quotes.
Here is Karl’s:
To supplement the words, we forced ourselves to select no more than 8 images from our time with the participants that we felt gave a good reflection of our time with them. (During our visits we take hundreds of photographs - focusing on different parts of the home, but forcing ourselves to be strict on a handful of images is a powerful exercise).
The Playlist
All projects are different of course, and whilst some debriefs are a little more traditional, for WTF 2024 we thought we’d put a playlist together.
The playlist served to share some music and some lyrics, that - when combined and curated - was another way of bringing our findings to life. For our audiences to feel our research a little more. Another way for us to tell a story about them.
We included some of the lyrics in the debrief:
Our playlist was shared with the agency, and we collaborated on the final version here.
Capturing Reality Truthfully
When you’ve been out and spent multiple hours with people, the job of editing and curation is not easy.
Trying to reflect participant reality as honestly and accurately as possible is a serious job. You have an obligation to portray them accurately, yet you can’t share every minute of your time with participants with your clients. So how do you attempt to do edit accurately?
This page from our Oral History book (that we’ll share in POST 3) explains some of our principles:
The Themes
We try and keep our overall themes short, concise and punchy. We want our audiences to feel something. To react to something.
And within our themes, there are multiple findings that we bring to life.
For WTF 2024 we curated our findings into the 5 themes below.
We’ll bring one of these themes to life in the next post, and share some of the content that sits behind it.
In POST 2, we’ll delve deeper into one of these themes, sharing some photographs, audio and video to bring it to life.