Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

We desire whatever it is—the place, the person, the thing, the period in our lives—we’re convinced we’re lacking.

allow us to make sense of the culture we inhabit, but these same glasses can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately.

Considering that 90 percent of what people give off in conversation are nonverbal signals, our truest identities can be found by studying who we are in our real lives, cultures and countries. This amalgamation of gestures, habits, likes, dislikes, hesitations, speech patterns, decors, passwords, tweets, status updates and more is what I call small

In nearly every instance, after conducting what I call Subtext Research (which I occasionally shorten to Subtexting), a detailed process that involves visiting consumers in their homes, gathering small data offline and online, and crunching, or Small Mining, these clues with observations and insights taken from around the world, there almost always

No matter how insignificant it may first appear, everything in life tells a story.

What desires lie in the gap between perception and reality, between reality and fantasy, between people’s conscious and unconscious fantasies? What are the imbalances inside the culture? What is there too much of, or too little? What desires aren’t being fed?

A lone piece of small data is almost never meaningful enough to build a case or create a hypothesis, but blended with other insights and observations gathered from around the world, the data eventually comes together to create a solution that forms the foundation of a future brand or business.

The cultural exaggerations I spend my business life trying to find operate both inside societies and between generations. Societies swing back and forth in more or less predictable ways.

A new business concept generally has its origins in a cultural imbalance or exaggeration—too much of something, or too little of something—which indicates that something is either missing or blocked in the society.