Last year I travelled some parts of Japan and I came across an exhibition that showed the work of Yosuke Ushigome, a Japanese artist based in the UK. The tilte of his work was: PROFESSIONAL SHARING.

The work consisted of a suit with some gadgets and a video that showed the uses of the suit. Most of the application were around the common subject of the sharing economy. The suit wearer would meet someone to charge its phone, would share pictures and information on things happening across Tokyo, would share his time queueing in place of someone else or share his health information while engaging on a particular activity for a customer.

The suit allowed the professional sharer to do his/her job and get paid right away.

Now, it is quite easy then to move a step closer to market research and imagine a world where, along with interviewers, analysts, moderators and so forth, we also have professional sharers:

Individuals using all sorts of wearable devices to share any information that could be of use.

One question that came to me was: “What if Google was actually trying to do something like this with its Google Glasses?”.

Most professional in the field of market research know that millions of people work for Google without even knowing it and Google Glasses would have been an amazing weapon in the arsenal of the search engine giant.

The experiment failed though…

Nevertheless the principle and the figure of the professional sharer will eventually join the market place to my opinion, and that’s where I start to dream.

I can only begin to imagine the numerous application of such a market research resource applied to insurance, health, but also public security, journalism and more.

This will give us much more data that could be free of the various limits of survey data yet being somewhat more “deep’ than the already milked transactional data.

It will then, possibly, become even more important for market researchers to establish meaningful correlations and relations between a range of data structures of all sorts.