Menu
Close
.svg)
A few days ago, as the year was finally winding down and my calendar was finally starting to breathe again, I received an early morning email from a dear friend. She lives in Europe. It wasn’t that long. It was warm, thoughtful, and very her.
She told me she’d let me know her word for 2026 after her ski trip. That it was still “percolating like amazing coffee.” (When she last visited Philadelphia, she received, from me, a package of La Colombe Nizza, my favorite!) She wished me a blessed holiday season, signed off with green hearts, and sent it -- of course -- from her iPhone.
What prompted that exchange was a simple question we'd discussed during an earlier WhatsApp chat volley: What’s your word for 2026?
That question has been following me around ever since.
In my day job, asking people to boil their thinking down to a single word is something I do all the time.
In qualitative interviews with physicians and patients, whether we’re discussing a target product profile, a branding idea, a positioning concept, or an early-stage campaign, I’ll often ask, near the end of the discussion:
“If you had to summarize this in just one word, what would it be?”
Not a sentence. Not even a short phrase. One word. Period.
And every time, there’s a pause.
You can almost hear respondent's the mental gears grinding. Because this question is hard. It demands discipline. It forces prioritization. It requires people to sacrifice nuance and decide what really matters.
That’s exactly why I love it.
What happens next is where the magic lives.
Some respondents answer instantly, almost reflexively. Others sit back, think carefully, and choose their word with intention. Both responses are equally valuable -- because the word itself is only the beginning. It's a tool for leverage.
The real insight comes with the follow-up: “Why that word?”
That’s where new frontiers of thinking open up. Hidden assumptions surface. Emotional drivers peek through. Language becomes revealing rather than performative.
It’s not uncommon for that one-word answer to unlock something that never showed up earlier in the interview -- despite all that careful probing, follow up questions, projective and behavioral science techniques we so meticulously design.
We saw this play out clearly in a concept testing project we wrapped up just this week -- successfully, I’m happy to say. The client was delighted with the results.
One of the most impactful outputs in the final report was also one of the simplest: a word cloud constructed entirely from respondents’ one-word summaries of each concept.
No editorializing. No re-labeling. Just their words, aggregated and sized according to frequency. We spent 20 minutes discussing it.
That visual achieved something powerful. It gave our client an immediate, intuitive sense of how their customers naturally perceived the ideas: where perceptions clustered, where they diverged, and which concepts owned distinct mental territory.
In a world of densely structured slides and sophisticated analytics, it was a reminder that clarity often comes from subtraction, not addition.
Which brings me back to my friend’s email -- and to this time of year.
As 2026 approaches, we’re conditioned to think in lists: resolutions, goals, habits, milestones. We aim for comprehensive self-improvement and end up with complexity that’s hard to sustain.
What if we took a page from our own marketing research playbook?
What if, instead of ten resolutions, we asked ourselves to do something far more difficult -- and far more clarifying?
What if we chose one word?
Not what we want to do, but how we want to be. A word that acts as a filter, a compass, a quiet check-in as the year unfolds.
Just like in research, the constraint is the feature.
I’ve been ruminating on mine for a while now. And the word I keep coming back to is resilience.
Resilience of body and mind as I continue to get older. Resilience in discipline -- showing up even when motivation dips. Resilience in mindset, building the mental fortitude and self-esteem to approach each day with purpose.
For me, resilience is about continuing to contribute, to share, and to be productive -- without becoming rigid or brittle. Strength with flexibility. Endurance with intention.
And like any good one-word response, it invites a lot of “why.”
As commercial, insights, and analytics professionals, we know how much power resides in distillation. We ask our customers to do it all the time; and we learn a great deal when they do.
So as we head into 2026, I’ll leave you with the same question my dear friend and I discussed:
If you had to summarize your focus for the year ahead in just one word, what would it be?
No phrases allowed.
I’d love to hear your word...and what led you to it.
