![]() A Look At The Landscape, Before We Leapīig Data hasn’t fully arrived yet, but it is coming. Qualitative market researchers are in distress, and like that buck trapped amid the blueberries this winter, instead of carefully moving to extract themselves from the threat, they’re pushing in the wrong direction, becoming more tightly bound to the material that threatens their survival. It’s constructed out of long strings of numbers, and it’s closing fast. There is no physical net restraining qualitative researchers, of course, but they have nonetheless become entangled in a network that is completely beyond their understanding. I think back to the fate of that buck whenever I see the reactions to Big Data among my colleagues in the profession of qualitative market research. I am confident that, although its antlers were eventually untangled from the netting, it did not survive the process. ![]() I asked him if I could help him with the buck, and he said not to worry, that he would take care of it. It’s the deer who are in the best physical condition that are the last to lose their antlers in the winter, he told me. My neighbor, a hunter who owned the land where the deer had been browsing, heard the commotion and came out his front door to stand next to me, watching as the struggling animal slowly weakened and collapsed. It thrashed with all the power it could summon, but its efforts made the problem worse. Pushing repeatedly in the same forward direction merely caused its antlers to become even more entangled with the netting than they had been before. I stopped and watched as the buck surged into a mighty leap, seeking to untangle itself with its considerable strength. Its gaze was set on me, perceiving me as the most pressing threat. The deer was not looking carefully at its predicament, though. At this point, if the buck had stopped to look up and see what had happened, it might have understood that it could lower its head and walk slowly backwards, to slip its antlers out of the netting and be free.
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