Hanna Chalmers

Good work starts with thoughtfulness. It's about taking the time to truly immerse yourself in a client's challenge before doing anything else. Sometimes that process even shows that no new research is needed, which clients tend to love. But either way, it's about pausing long enough to think clearly.

Rigour is another non-negotiable. I hate slapdash research – there's too much of it around and it's lazy. In a world where AI can produce quick, surface-level answers, there's no point replicating that. The only work worth doing is the kind that digs deeper and makes sense of things properly.

I don't think my definition of good work has changed all that much over time. It's still about care, curiosity and conviction – taking pride in what you deliver. I probably over-deliver, but I can't hand over something I'm not proud of. The projects we win are usually the ones where I genuinely care about the subject; that interest comes through.

And then there's breadth. One reason I set up Culture Studio was to escape the old divide between commercial and social research – I don't believe those worlds should be siloed. Understanding what's happening in society, in culture, in politics, inevitably makes the commercial work better, and vice versa.

Good work starts with what I call a culture hack – a period of deep thinking where we triangulate the problem from multiple perspectives before deciding on a method. Lots of agencies say they do this, but often it's lip service. We give it real time and attention, and AI has made that stage even richer – we can now surface far more cultural material, faster, and go in better informed.

The second part is collaboration. I don't think good research happens alone. I love working with people from different disciplines – behavioural scientists, semioticians, designers – people who look at a question in completely different ways. That mix always sharpens the thinking.

But there's a balance. Collaboration doesn't mean consensus. There comes a point where you have to take ownership of the story. The everyone-in-the-Google-Doc version of teamwork rarely produces great work; it just flattens everything out. I've realised that while it's good to bring in other perspectives, the writing stage needs a clear tone of voice – that's often what clients are buying.

The time and budget squeeze is real! There's this growing assumption that because AI exists, everything should cost less or take half the time. But you can't shortcut the bit I bring to the table – the thinking time – and when that's compromised, the quality drops.

There's also something about how projects are structured, especially in bigger agencies. You do a bit of thinking upfront, then there's all the madness of fieldwork, and suddenly you've got two days to write the report. Everyone's exhausted by then. Even when you love what you do, there's still that feeling of, 'thank God that's finished.' It's a shame, because that's often when you should have the energy to think more deeply.

So yes, clients want things faster, but part of it's on us too – finding ways to protect the space to think.

I think you just have to be really clear about what can't be cut. I'm always upfront with clients – this is non-negotiable; you can't do good work without it.

It's easier with clients I've worked with before, because they already know that's part of how I work. With new clients, you have to make the case. I'm working with a start-up at the moment, and that's exactly the conversation – they want to just run a quick survey, and I'm saying, fine, but here's what you'll miss if you do.

It's about explaining the value. Part of doing good research is being able to communicate why it's worth doing. In a way, it's making the case for the industry itself.

Reading proper books – full books, cover to cover. It sounds obvious, but it's become quite rare and it takes real time and focus. But that's the point. It's a slog sometimes, sure, but I think that's part of why it matters.

As I've got older in the industry – I got called a veteran the other day, which was slightly horrifying – I've realised how important it is to hang on to that depth. There's so much brilliant new thinking happening but at the same time there's this wave of people calling themselves cultural insight experts who don't seem to know what cultural theory is. I go off on a rant about it every now and again, then catch myself.

But reading long-form work keeps you grounded. It helps you make better arguments, reference what's come before, and stop behaving like you're the first person to ever notice something. There's a whole lineage of thought explaining how we got here – people writing in the 1970s and earlier who were already seeing the patterns we're talking about now.

Probably AI. Like many, I guess, I've an ambivalent relationship with it. On one hand, it absolutely needs regulation – it can't be left to govern itself – but at the same time, it's brilliant.

At first, I wasn't really sure how useful it could be for what we do. I'd tried a few things and it all felt a bit over-sold. Then I started using it more seriously and realised how powerful it can be, especially for analysis. You can put all your groups in and it does the boring part for you – pulls everything together so you can focus on the thinking. I've always felt AI should take the boring stuff off our hands, not the creative part.

Where I really struggle is how it's being used creatively. I work a lot in the music industry, and I'm a trustee at Youth Music, so I find it painful seeing AI twisted into the creative process. I hate that. But the bit I do like is that it gives you more time for the proper thinking. That's the part that matters.

Are they raising the bar or moving the goalposts?

At the moment, it's mainly about timings. Everyone wants things faster. I'm seeing it across the board. When I was at Ipsos, we'd do these big multi-market studies and be debriefing on the road, and that pace made sense for the type of work we were doing. But I think AI has really warped expectations around how quickly things should be done.

Clients are under huge pressure – budgets are tighter, jobs feel less secure – so I understand where it's coming from. But what's strange is how often the rush isn't real. You know, the classic situation – it all has to be finished by Friday, total panic, and then two weeks later they still haven't looked at it.

And maybe there's slightly less appetite for the more exploratory stuff right now. I don't know if that's just a phase – maybe post-Covid there was that burst of curiosity and now things have tightened again. Hopefully that comes back, because that's the work that often leads somewhere genuinely new.

What's missing from the conversation today?

It feels like the whole conversation is just AI, AI, AI – and there's a kind of tension sitting underneath everything. Work in general feels very wobbly right now and that is clearly troubling the research industry. I think if you're a mid-sized agency you'd be nervous. You're either quick and nimble, or a big global beast. If you're somewhere in the middle, it's hard.

I'd love us to get to that point where AI's just normalised – when we're all using it, but no one's obsessing over it. And what I hope we're talking more about is people. Actual people. Because what worries me right now is how quickly the industry's embracing things like synthetic data. We're supposed to understand humans, and yet we're finding ways to take them out of the process. Call me a Luddite, but that seems completely upside down.

Probably 'culture'. It's hard, because it's in the name of my business! But it's become so overused it's almost meaningless. It feels like the word 'insight' all over again – remember how ad agencies used to sit around endlessly debating what an insight actually was? We're now doing the same thing with culture.

It's just become really tiresome. Everyone wants to debate what culture is, rather than actually engaging with it. And honestly, learn where these ideas come from. Because it's become this kind of vanity label – people calling themselves cultural strategists because it sounds good, not because they understand the theory behind it.

I've spent a lifetime finding that one hard to answer. I still don't have a neat version – it always spirals into a long, slightly dull explanation. I'd rather just talk about the projects, because that's where the interesting stuff lives. If you say market research, people's eyes glaze over or they assume you just do focus groups. Academics can be especially sniffy; I've had plenty tell me it's not real research. That's changing a bit. Oddly, LinkedIn has helped – it's the first time commercial researchers and academics are bumping into each other in the same space and actually seeing each other's work. My mum was an academic and always told me not to follow her into it. She had a point. It's been hollowed out, the pace is glacial, and she's always been amazed by the speed and quality of what we can do on the commercial side. We might only have a few months to answer a question they'd spend years on, but the work can still be robust. There's plenty both sides could learn from each other. Also, our own industry doesn't market itself very well. From the outside it probably looks a bit dull. But maybe that's not all bad. It keeps us slightly odd, attracts interesting people and stops it getting too polished or professionalised. My only frustration is the old boys' club – the same people winning the same awards, still acting like the gatekeepers.

Whether it's the way people go on about generations or the latest so-called frameworks, there's just so much of it – and most of it's stupidness. I tend not to engage anymore. You see the same things being recycled again and again, everyone trying to look clever rather than actually say something new. It's all a bit lazy.

The work that really stays with me is when you can see it make a difference – when it actually changes something. I can't talk about most of it, but the policy work we do is incredible for that. The GambleAware projects, for example, have already led to real change, which is amazing to see. You feel like you've genuinely made a difference.

The harder part is when you hand something over and it disappears into the ether. You put so much into it and want to know what happened next. As an industry, we're a bit too polite about that – we don't always ask. With long-term clients, you tend to see the impact; with new ones, you just have to trust it lands somewhere useful.

It's hard to say, because it's all I've ever done – it's basically who I am. My sons always tease me for talking to everyone. I'll start chatting to people on buses or in shops, and they're like, why do you have to talk to everyone? I don't even notice I'm doing it anymore. I think this job makes you that way – genuinely curious. You stop making those shorthand assumptions about people and start noticing how unexpected they are. I was buying a pint of milk once and got talking to the shopkeeper; he ended up telling me he'd seen Wings live. You just wouldn't expect it – I loved that. Maybe I'd always have been like this – who knows. But I do think some researchers aren't actually that interested in people, which baffles me. Curiosity isn't optional in this line of work – it's the whole point.

It'd probably be: what's the biggest challenge for the industry, if you take AI out of the equation?

For me, it's mediocrity. There's too much rushed, half-baked work out there, and it really undermines what we do. This is a proper skill set – it takes time and thought. Anyone can run a few interviews or Google around a topic, but that's not the same as doing good work.