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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?

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