My WARC Op-Ed: A Pet Food Team at a Dance Show

This op-ed first ran in WARC on November 3, 2026.

Strategists are spending less and less time with the people their work is built for. WARC's 2026 survey found that only 23% of strategists now do in-person research every month, down from 35% a year earlier. The same report calls strategists "guardians of reality." Reality is hard to guard from behind a laptop.

AI has made it easier than ever to synthesize what we already know, and that's genuinely useful. But synthesis isn't discovery. AI can help us find patterns, test hypotheses and even suggest new questions. What it can't do is directly observe what was never captured in the data. When every team works from similar information with similar tools, strategies become polished, plausible and increasingly alike. We can dissect the aisle we're in all day long and still miss the connection that could redefine it.

For almost 20 years, I've helped brand, strategy and insights teams learn from passionate experts beyond their own categories, gathering the cultural intelligence that data alone tends to miss. The value has never been the outing itself. It's what happens when a team discovers an unexpected connection together, believes in it and turns it into strategy.

We once designed an immersion for a Purina team exploring what "real" means to people. One experience was an interactive performance by a contemporary dance company in San Francisco. There was no stage. The dancers moved all around us, so close we could feel their heartbeat, see their sweat and feel the vibration of every step. Afterward we shared food with the company. By the end of the night, people were talking about "my dancer." Each of us had claimed one as our own.

Another visit took us to an organic farm in Sonoma. Some of the team couldn't even figure out how to walk between the rows of lettuce! The farmers patiently showed us how to pick each vegetable, and a chef cooked dinner with our harvest. Was it really the best meal of anyone's life? Maybe not. But it tasted better because we'd had our hands in it.

Pet food never came up at either stop. The connection emerged when the team reflected on what the two experiences shared. At the performance, watching had become personal. At the farm, a meal had become personal because we'd picked the vegetables ourselves. Taking part created a different kind of connection, one that simply watching might not. It gave the team a new way to frame the challenge: what if buying pet food felt less like a transaction and more like being let in on how it's made?

A report might have told the team that ingredient transparency was a trend. The immersion gave them a more tangible way to think about it: there's a difference between knowing where something comes from and feeling connected to how it's made. That difference became the starting point for an idea the team called From Buyer to Insider. Open up how the food is made, invite people into the story behind the ingredients, and turn a routine purchase into a relationship with the product and the people who make it.

How to make field time count

Start with a tension, not a destination. "What does real mean?" is a topic. "People want to know what's in their food, but rarely see how it's made" is a tension that gives a team something to explore. Choose experiences that approach it from different angles, and design them so the team takes part rather than watches. Ask people to note what surprised them and what challenged their assumptions. Then close by turning those observations into hypotheses the team can test. The goal isn't novelty. It's a connection people would be unlikely to make at their desks.

Leave your category on purpose. Most teams know their own category inside out. What they rarely see is the rest of their customers' lives. We once took a Lowe's executive team around Austin, and none of the stops had anything to do with home improvement. One was a community for people rebuilding their lives after homelessness, a world away from store aisles and project budgets, where residents hosted us for a meal. Over the meal, they talked about how, for a lot of people, home is really about community. For a retailer that sells everything that goes into a house, that was a useful jolt: what makes a home feel like home often isn't on the shelf. The team came back with an idea they called Beyond the Four Walls: look past the products inside a house to the relationships and shared spaces that make it a home, and consider the role the brand could play.

Get a little uncomfortable. Some of the most useful stops look a little out there on an itinerary. That's often the point. We once took a Coca-Cola team around New York to explore risk, with visits that included the FDNY and a sex educator. Both offered a different angle on the same question: how do you build trust when the stakes feel high? Firefighters earn it by being open about risk long before an emergency. The sex educator showed how naming what you want, and where your limits are, makes people feel safe. The team named the idea Radical Trust: people trust you more when they understand the risks, can say what they need and know where the boundaries are.

Mix the teams. In many big companies, strategy, marketing, innovation and the people who build things, whether R&D, product or operations, work in silos and pass ideas down the line like a baton. When they interpret the same experience together, they challenge each other's assumptions while it's still cheap to change course, and test ideas against what people need and what the company can deliver. That's the business case: find out early what's feasible, before months go into an idea nobody can deliver.

Make fieldwork part of the job

Field research doesn't always need a new line item, but it does need intent. A yearly offsite can become real fieldwork instead of another meeting. A conference trip can include a few experiences chosen to challenge assumptions. A new leader or a post-reorg reset is a natural moment to explore together. Between bigger projects, make it a habit to meet one unconventional expert or visit one unfamiliar place each month.

Fieldwork doesn't guarantee better strategy. It creates the opportunity, and the quality of the question and the work that follows decide the rest. An insight handed over in a deck is easy to agree with and just as easy to forget. One a team discovers for itself is different: people own it, defend it and carry it into the next brief.

You don't have to dance. But you do have to leave the office.

Key takeaways

Use AI to extend human inquiry, not replace it. Synthesis is valuable, but distinctive strategy also needs cultural intelligence that was never in the data.

Design fieldwork around a real tension. Choose unfamiliar experiences, take part, and turn what the team learns into ideas it can test.

Make discovery cross-functional and repeatable. Bring the people who shape and deliver the strategy into the field, and use the offsites and trips already on the calendar.