Did you see The Audience last night on UK’s Channel 4?  It’s a new show in which, 50 members of the public follow an individual facing life-changing decisions for a week and decide how they should resolve their dilemmas.

Now, I hate reality TV as much as the next man, but I caught the end of this and the concept struck me as fascinating from a research methodology point of view.

We spend a lot of time on behalf of our clients, researching “audiences”, watching them to understand, among other things, how they make decisions, but the thought of having the audience follow the client around to give a more informed opinion on what decisions they should make goes way beyond typical co-creative/crowd-sourcing methods.

Clearly it’s not practical or viable to have 50 customers following one of our clients around for a week, but this, on a smaller scale (fewer followers, less time, focused on key workflows/touchpoints) and only where we need the audience to provide a considered view, could work wonders in getting members of the public or B2B customers’ opinions on complex operational issues.

But let’s not go crazy now, I shan’t be tuning into Big Brother for methodological inspiration.