The difference between conventional marketing research and innovative new ways to generate insights about customers is aptly summed up by a character in sci-fi master William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. “I want to make the public aware of something they don’t quite yet know that they know,” he tells heroine Cayce Pollard, a ‘coolhunter’ who scours the world spotting trends for corporate clients. “They’ll move on that. They’ll think they thought of it.”

They’ll move on it.