Fail again, fail better: Lessons from the life of a qualitative innovator

Peter Totman

Failure can play a positive role and bring significant personal and professional development – qualitative researchers need to balance their fear of failure with a willingness to take risks in order to maintain an innovative edge.

Setting the scene

Purpose of the paper

Using a Samuel Beckett quotation in the title perhaps sets expectations too high, but this paper has lofty aims – no less than to challenge our attitudes to failure and reframe our experience of it.

The following pages share the positive role failure has played within my life – to explore failure within a single career. A number of anecdotes will be shared, which demonstrate that failure should not be seen as something to simply 'get through' and survive – it can bring rewards that shallow success never can!

It is an important...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands