WTF is going on with Britain's Heartland? (Post 2)
POST 2: THE DEEP DIVE INTO A THEME
This is the second post in a 3-part series where we’re sharing a deep-dive into Saatchi & Saatchi’s recent piece of research “What the fuck is going on with Britain’s Heartland?” - again with huge thanks to Richard Huntington and the agency for allowing us to share so much.
POST 1 was an overview of the entire project and can be seen here.
In this second post we’re going to take you through one of the 5 themes we identified on our travels and debriefed to the agency. Saatchi & Saatchi took this information, augmented with expert interviews and quantitative research, and wrote their brilliant book that you can find out more about here.
The journey to the themes
Distilling over 30 - 40 hours of conversations, via audio, video and transcriptions is no mean feat.
It’s best done with collaborators who you can sense check your thinking with, debate and discuss findings. And it’s best done - I find - with time to breathe between the visit and the final output.
I tend to immediately capture my thoughts after a session - raw and emotionally-led findings that jumped out at me. Then I find the best way is to leave it, crack on with more visits, and then come back to everything in totality.
That wider context and time gap brings comparisons, contradictions, similarities and differences between not only the participants, but different parts of each participant visit too.
I’ll then write statements, headings, or provocations that are sparked by looking through the raw footage. I’ll see how many of them fit together into a bigger theme, and through spending time moving things around and prioritising things, we’ll eventually arrive at a handful of big themes and a narrative story that weaves through them.
The sense check comes when you pin up photographs of all the participants, and look at the themes through their eyes. Through our time with them. Do we feel the headings reflect their thoughts and feelings? And for themes that aren’t universal, is it fair to highlight one side of the argument over the other? Or if only a few people reflected a theme, are we introducing unfair bias by including it? If they ever saw the output, do we think they’d agree it was a fair reflection?
Setting the tone
In the debrief, before we shared 50 slides, showed over 50 photographs, and played over 30 audio and video clips, we showed this montage video to set the tone:
(For some briefs we work with specialist camera and editing experts… but this one was completed by yours truly on a whim a day before the debrief!)
Bringing a theme to life
We’re going to share just a few snippets of original content from one theme to give you a glimpse into the overall debrief. Clearly this is only a tiny amount that we used to build up our view around the theme output.
THEME 2 - INDEFATIGABLY NAVIGATING THEIR WAY THROUGH THE BROKEN SYSTEM.
Everyone we met had a smile on their faces, were broadly happy and said they felt “blessed” when they compared themselves to other people less fortunate. Yet they all had their struggles, stresses and strains - some more open about sharing them, some more reluctant due to their perceived privilege compared to others.
Money and assets bring time, space and options
Each of them had an ‘asset buffer’ - some security (money, savings, memorabilia, property etc) - that would provide them with time and space if things got worse for them. But these buffers varied wildly, which impacted their mindsets and approaches to life.
Here is Natasha talking about how she likes to plan things (partly because of her financial situation):
She’d plan TWO YEARS ahead if she could. Which contrasts against Sarah’s spontaneity - made possible in part due to her family’s asset buffer being greater than that of Natasha. The buffer they have allows her to make snap decisions:
Their biggest fears
We ask every participant (on every project) their biggest worry over the next 5 years… here is Stacy and Peter’s response:
The “we’d manage though” being a direct response but also an overall theme from the research - stoicism, the British ‘stiff upper lip’, the getting on with things in the face of adversity. The ‘not wanting to moan because others are worse off’ mindset that permeates those in the heartland.
Thrift is in the eye of the beholder
Lastly, everyone we met was living ‘thriftily’ in some way. Doing something that sat alongside their day jobs to either bring in extra income, or to reduce their outgoings. These are people who may not have acted like this in the recent past, but due to money getting tighter, or their mortgage payments going up, they are experimenting with new ways of making their money go further.
We heard from people using Vinted to maximise inert value, using Too Good To Go to make their food budgets go further (not because they needed food handouts, but because it freed up money elsewhere).
… Or having side jobs… such as Adrian, who runs his own business and has a PhD, yet drives a Morrisons delivery van once a week:
For others, it’s just a case of doing something that may lead to value instead of wasting time mindlessly scrolling social feeds… such as Lindsey who enters up to 40 competitions a day.
This clip is a good example of a wide conversation opening up something surprising and interesting, something she didn’t immediately bring up in conversation, something that required a little probing, yet something that unearthed some gold:
As you can see, there is so much rich insight from spending time with people in their natural environment, chatting to them in the space they’re comfortable, to truly start getting toward their realities.
Above we’ve shared photography, audio and video, but the verbatim words of participants can be just as powerful.
In the next newsletter - POST 3 - we’ll share with you the beauty, power and importance of words.
This is a superb series. Thank you, it is so interesting. I love the idea of music. and the notion of a broken system, rather than the oft quoted 'broken Britian" is genius. I know S&S commissioned it, but are you considering publishing it in full, or recording a presentation of the results? Nick