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I was passed a link to this by a col­league (thanks Simon).

It’s a quad­ruped robot developed by Boston Dynam­ics. Make sure you get at least half way though when they give it a shove from the side and watch it get its bal­ance back. Scary.

As I’ve been very good lately (although not at post­ing as often as I should), I was let out to attend the Open Rights Group’s event Cre­at­ive busi­ness in the digital era. Over the space of a few hours, I got a good over­view of the cur­rent state of play on open intel­lec­tual prop­erty (the whole Cre­at­ive Com­mons thing) and was treated to examples from some very inter­est­ing people using CC in anger.

Suw Char­man took us through the vari­ous types of CC license and some of the main mod­els cre­at­ive busi­nesses are using to dis­trib­ute their work using them.

One of the things that really got me think­ing was when we got into talk­ing about exactly what the product is (and what are its com­ple­ments and substitutes).

To give a (prob­ably poor) example: music sales. Tra­di­tion­ally, the phys­ical CD is the product. Its com­ple­ments might include band t-shirts and a sub­sti­tute might be an MP3 down­load. But what if you begin rede­fin­ing the product? What if the real product is a live gig or a range of mer­chand­ise? Then the notion of giv­ing away the tra­di­tional stuff doesn’t seem so crazy. It can also take you into a dif­fer­ent (less crowded, less com­mod­it­ised) space.

It’s easy to see how con­fu­sion (or dis­agree­ment) about the product often messes up cli­ent : agency rela­tion­ships. You get the situ­ation where cli­ents think they are buy­ing out­put (ads, sites etc) and agen­cies think they are selling cre­ativ­ity. In real­ity, both are right to a degree. Of course the real value lies some­where else entirely: mar­ket transformation.

Open IP is going to become increas­ingly import­ant as brands col­lab­or­ate ever more closely with cus­tom­ers to cre­ate com­pel­ling stor­ies and exper­i­ences. Check out the event’s wiki, there’s some pretty good stuff on there.

The truth is, for the most part, they don’t know. Quite often they know what they don’t want (lousy ser­vice, crappy products etc) but as for what they really want, the stuff that moves the con­ver­sa­tion onwards, that changes beha­viour – they’re not so sure.

Some years back I worked with a com­pany who loved research. They researched everything. And they spent a small for­tune doing so. This led to a vari­ety of results:

• They became very, very slow – everything took an age
• They got more and more frus­trated that their cus­tom­ers couldn’t come up with “the answer”
• They spent money that could have been put to bet­ter use
• But they covered their backs, no one got fired

The other week For­tune pub­lished an inter­view with Steve Jobs (well worth a read). In it he points out:

It’s not about fool­ing people, and it’s not about con­vin­cing people that they want some­thing they don’t. We fig­ure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at hav­ing the right dis­cip­line to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.

So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my cus­tom­ers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.“‘

As people, we’re pretty lousy at pre­dict­ing the future. This is as true for the per­form­ance of the stock mar­ket as it is for what we’ll have for din­ner a week from now. How­ever, we’re abso­lutely bril­liant at post-rationalising why we did some­thing in the past. We can cre­ate fant­astic stor­ies that demon­strate out think­ing pro­cess and how one thing led to another and another. The prob­lem is, as Hugh Laurie’s Dr House would say, “Every­body lies”.

They don’t mean to lie (well not nor­mally) it’s just the way memory works. There is a per­cep­tion that human memory works like com­puter memory, you access it and out it pops, same every time. The truth is, how­ever, that we cre­ate our memor­ies on the fly every time we access them. Add this to the fact that we all like to be seen as rational, sens­ible people and you can see why so much research deliv­ers so little of any real value.

But it’s worse than that. Whenever you ask any­one for their thoughts, they imme­di­ately access the con­scious part of their brain. Yet 95% of their think­ing hap­pens in the uncon­scious brain. As Ger­ald Zalt­man points out in his excel­lent book How cus­tom­ers think:

Rather than actu­ally guid­ing or con­trolling beha­viour. Con­scious­ness seems mainly to make sense of beha­viour after it is executed.

Post-rationalisation again.

So what to do. Do we simply ditch research alto­gether? Per­son­ally, I’d say if you are going to do mar­ket­ing research, it is best to keep it to test­ing broad pro­pos­i­tions. Even then, treat the res­ults with a whole heap of scep­ti­cism and as just one small part of the whole.

Bet­ter still is to research by doing. Keep some budget aside and try stuff out in addi­tion to your main pro­grammes. Treat your pro­grammes as always in beta. Be flex­ible. Adapt.

It’s amaz­ing how much can be done for rel­at­ively little cost. Sure, no focus group will have your back but you might, just might, dis­cover the one thing that changes everything. And how cool is that?