The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

I know, I know, more Steve Jobs inspiration for your ear.

Being in the market research industry, I'm not going to comment on the validity of this as I am dependent on my clients for my well-being, but I'll reiterate a point I've made before: market research IS beneficial if used properly. It's also a matter of terminology. Just because Steve Jobs did not necessarily run traditional market research, there is no doubt that the people in Apple and possibly even Steve Jobs himself were influenced by individuals around them, larger level macro-level trends, and intuitive human behavioral patterns on a day to day basis. These are things that are impossible to ignore (unless you live in a massive, sealed off bio-dome, which I'm not putting past employees at Apple.) But therein lies my point, research is meant to influence, inspire, and support business decisions not solve problems or create solutions.

I wholeheartedly agree with this last point however, many clients expect consumers to give them the answers and solve their problems. This will never happen. no. matter. what.

In 1999, I was on a team designing eyewear for Burton Snowboard's Anon Optics line. The team lead asked the sponsored riders why they needed their own type of eyewear separate from skiers. The young riders struggled with the question because their functional needs were largely the same. However, when asked what type of car they would like to buy, they reached an almost unanimous consensus: the Audi A4 Quattro. We were perplexed why a bunch of 17-10 year olds who were paid to snowboard would want such an adult car. When asked why they liked the Audi, one of the riders responded that it can do what he wanted functionally, but it let him decide who he wanted to be without making a statement of its own. That statement became the design principle that guided the products. They wouldn't be expressive for expressiveness’ sake. Like a skier’s goggle, they would be as clean and minimal as possible (in the world of action sports) and let their rider express himself by what he was doing rather than what he was wearing. A pair of Levi’s jeans, white Converse sneakers, and a Hanes white T-shirt might seem like the most anonymous objects in the world, but put them on James Dean and you have something else all together!

simple, yet powerful.

4. We are suspicious of enjoying anything anyone else has told us about.

This is the habit that strikes me as most problematic. Fifteen years ago, the main problem a lover of music-- or film, or television, or other varieties of pop culture-- would experience was scarcity. It took money to get hold of the stuff, and if you liked anything weird, it took effort, too. As a result, the default mode was to like what you could. In fact, the best way to demonstrate to others that you cared and were discerning about music was to like things-- to have enjoyed exploring all these realms that took some effort to get to.

Over the past decade and a half, this situation seems to have reversed. The problem people talk about now is not scarcity but glut: a glut of music available to consume, a glut of media to tell you about it, a glut of things that desperately want your attention. Somewhere along the way, the default mode has taken a hard shift in the direction of showing your discernment by not liking things-- by seeing through the hype and feeling superior to whatever you're being told about in a given week. Give it the attention it wants, but in the negative.

This extends far outside of music. There's an entire Arch Snarky Commenter persona people now rush to adopt, in which they read things on the Internet and then compete to most effectively roll their eyes at it. And there's nothing inherently terrible about that; a lot of the phenomena we read about every day can afford that kind of skepticism.

It's interesting, though, just how overclocked a bullshit detector can get-- to the point where we're verging on a kind of paranoia about things that are, in the end, mostly trying to offer us pleasure. There's some kind of whiff of it in just knowing that some artist couldn't possibly be what she seems, and must be part of an elaborate plot to trick people less savvy than you are. Or maybe that line of thinking just makes us feel more clever than saying something sucks.

Even sports coverage on television has become increasingly web-like, both in look and tone. If you watch a sporting event, news recap, or opinion show on TV, you’ll find a screen cluttered with text and graphics, framing on-screen personalities (overwhelmingly men) who argue and joke with each other.

Shanoff thinks the influence between TV and the web is mutual:

The most “web” product in the history of sports media came from a TV show that launched even before the initial popularization of blogs: Pardon The Interruption, which launched in 2001 with its implicit refutation of windy sportswriting cliches and its marriage of accessible personalities and a user-friendly format. I cannot think of a sports-media product that is more highly regarded by fans and “pros” alike. PTI accurately foreshadowed — down to its on-screen graphics — the “stream” that would become the dominant visual metaphor for both Facebook and Twitter (and thus the dominant visual metaphor for news consumption in the 21st century).

Shows like PTI, and the countless programs it influenced, offer a graphic approach to television news perfectly suited for the sudden ubiquity of big-screen high-definition TVs and an audience increasingly accustomed to processing multiple information streams at once. But we don’t just experience sports in front of the TV, on the radio, or at the event any more. Even when we do, we’re likely to have a mobile device in hand, ready to tweet our thoughts or share video and pictures about what we see.

And we don’t only read online sportswriting in front of our desktop PCs, with multiple browser windows open giving us stats in hand. We also read it in coffee shops or in bed, on tablets. We don’t read it only to win arguments, to boo or cheer, but to relax, reflect, and remember.

In my formative years in the early to mid 2000's, I was heavily engrossed in this so-called "golden period" of sports journalism. I watched PTI (and Around the Horn) almost religiously. I read Page 2 every day after school (until it turned shitty).

When I was in college (sometime around '07) I started reading freedarko.com, still to me, an eye-opening way to view basketball and sports in general.

Essentially these people, their articles, their views, their tv shows, played a big role both in developing my interests, but also how I view being a sports fan.

Great article and I think we're only entering the first chapter to the potential of how we access / follow / engage with sports.

"Many examples can be found of people who speak Mandarin to a high level but who do not understand how China works... They may have learnt their Chinese shut up in their study reading the Analects."

-- Geoff Raby, Australian ambassador to Beijing, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald on May 19, 2011. Raby seems to have been criticizing his boss, Kevin Rudd, Australian Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister. Rudd studied Chinese under a scholar known for his translation of the Confucian Analects.

Abandoned but not entirely forgotten, as in March 1968, just 20 years after the UN's first guidelines were published, Robert Kennedy delivered a (now famous) speech in Kansas on the limitations of measuring economic growth:

"It counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl...Yet...[it]...does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.

"It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

Since then, in other spheres of life, we have witnessed some quite fundamental changes, such as the end of the cold war, the rise of China, the advent of the internet, advances in medical care, increased multiculturalism, and the recognition of the risks of global climate change. Yet here we are another 40 years on and still stuck with GDP as our indicator of societal progress. 

not necessarily a revolutionary viewpoint, but one that often gets forgotten by marketers / business strategiests / the Chinese government who often point to GDP as a sign of "social gain" in China.

I would debate that in China wealth is not necessarily tied to happiness, but it is tied to stability, opportunity, and social mobility. Something that is not uncommon to most Americans.

There is society, beautifully. And then there are people.

Here’s the thing. Great consumer insights are not – in my experience – discovered. They are thought of. Conceived in the mind of some smart, informed person. They are not found, they are intuited. They are not mined, they are identified and hypothesized.

really great perspective on this notion of "insights" within the industry.