AI in Qualitative Market Research

Real dads don't want to be inspiring on screen. They want to be recognized. Hollywood spent decades telling dads how to be dads. [National Research Group](https://www.linkedin.com/company/national-research-group-a-stagwell-company) (NRG) wanted to know which version families actually called real. They put eight fictional fathers, pulled from film and TV, in front of hundreds of families: dads on their own, dads with their partner, dads with their kids. An AI moderator asked what felt true and what felt like a script. The scale is the point. Every debrief NRG runs lands on the same question from clients. "Even if you're doing dozens of in-depth interviews, multiple focus groups, you get those interesting nuggets and insights. But then you take them to the client and there's always a sense of: is this really a trend? It's very hard to validate, and very hard to demonstrate the difference between an important trend and a one-off anomaly," said [Fergus Navaratnam-Blair](https://uk.linkedin.com/in/fergus-navaratnam-blair-aa0a72a1), VP Trends and Futures at NRG. NRG designed dyad interviews, two people answering together. Research that hadn’t been done before. "The number one thing we trusted about [Conveo](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/conveo-ai) was the flexibility. When we wanted to do novel things that were outside the scope of their current platform, the Conveo team were very flexible in helping us do that, even building and deploying new features within the platform," Fergus said. But there was one catch. Online panels couldn't legally consent a parent and child into the same interview, so NRG moved that cohort in-person, mid-study. What came out the other side was a read NRG could defend. 550 respondents across four linked studies, and not just what people said about each archetype but how they said it, repeated across hundreds of families. Those reactions now anchor NRG's white papers on the evolution of fatherhood. That shifted what NRG can sell, and Fergus thinks it raises the bar for what agencies compete on next. "The agencies that win from here are the ones who understand the value of a test-and-learn mindset when it comes to what AI can open up, but keep it human-directed." For [National Research Group](https://www.linkedin.com/company/national-research-group-a-stagwell-company), human-directed means the study design is theirs and the depth and scale are [Conveo](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/conveo-ai)'s. Sometimes that starts with a whole family, watching TV together. Full story in the video. Case study in the comments 👇️