I come from a small town in Germany. We’re so provincial that the closest McDonald’s sits by the nearby A5 motorway. It doesn’t have much of a claim to fame. There’s the splendid baroque palace, rebuilt after the war, and the older amongst us can belt out all stanzas of the town song (about a mythical alcoholic aristocrat who imparted his love of drinking to the townspeople). But for many other Germans it really is merely a motorway junction.
Let’s face it, Bruchsal, is a place you drive past.
I couldn’t wait to get away and when I moved to my first big city I was hooked. I totally signed up to the idea that life happens in the metropolis. It’s where the interesting people are, it’s where culture happens, it’s where opportunity resides. And, of course, I’ve been running a company in London for over 10 years, a city still attracting a diverse workforce from all over the continent and further afield, and a hub for business opportunities. The place to be.
Nonetheless, over recent years I’ve started to re-evaluate my small home town. Yes, even before Covid, all the shopping you could do on a Sunday was of the window variety. And yes, it still lacks a decent restaurant. But it has a charming little wine bar, a great Italian ice cream parlour, and an outdoor swimming pool several lengths better than any in London.
What’s more, it has become a centre for innovation. It’s long been home to SEW EuroDrive, a specialist in electric motor technology, as well as to DG Flugzeugbau, a leading manufacturer of glider aeroplanes. And I’ve just seen a press release about Volocopter, a fairly sizeable start-up manufacturing flying electric taxis – the HQ is in Bruchsal, but there’s also an office in Singapore. All three companies are cutting-edge and world-class. They are rooted in engineering and technology, and benefit from their proximity to centres of academic excellence – from the University of Karlsruhe to the renowned Fraunhofer applied research institutes a mere 20kms away.
Until recently, Thinktank’s research in Germany – typically commissioned by global marketers out of the UK or the US – had never included a place like Bruchsal. And even slightly bigger cities in this prosperous southwestern part of Germany have barely featured. Perhaps this is because the region’s biggest city, Stuttgart, home to Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, has just 600,000 inhabitants, and international research rarely bothers with anywhere under 1 million.
And, of course, this used to make sense. We couldn’t travel everywhere so of course we went where there were good international flight connections and hoped that large population centres would provide us with a snapshot of a country. Plus, we (post-)rationalised, the big city would give us access to trends which would eventually trickle down to the multitude of small places we couldn’t easily access.
But two-thirds of Germans live in small towns or medium-sized cities. In France, densely populated areas house only 38% of the population. Even in the UK more than half the population live in places with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants.
It’s arguably worth listening to small-town inhabitants because their realities may be closer to mainstream thinking than that of their big city cousins – and they may in fact set the agenda in important ways. Talking to people in Corby and Sevenoaks would have made the Brexit vote less of a shock than by sticking with our qual staples of London and Manchester.
Research with small town denizens can be a great reality check for global marketers and helps us do our jobs of taking our clients out of their marketing bubble – the good news is that we are now doing this far more readily than before the pandemic.
While we have had to forego face-to-face, this has had the positive effect of having changed the big city orientation of research – digital tools like video platforms have opened our horizons. In recent months, Thinktank has talked to and observed Zoom groups with people from Waco, Texas, and Georgetown, Malaysia, as well as in a multitude of small places across Europe.
Remote research has not only delivered more realism but also a more holistic understanding of how a broader range of people live their lives. It has also been a great cliché buster. The metropolis is not the only place where we can find trendsetters - recently we talked to small-town early adopters about topics ranging from clean energy through to electric vehicles.
Plus, mixing big city with small town perspectives makes for more heterogeneous views and hence more inspirational and dynamic focus groups.
I haven’t moderated a focus group with one of my fellow Bruslers as we like to call ourselves as yet but this is now far more likely to happen than ever …and that is definitely a good thing. My home town with its tech and engineering savvy may well prove to be not only a fount of innovation but also a well of great research for clients.
Sabine Stork is a founding partner of Thinktank International Research