Aug 28, 2009
Customer Insight vs. Customer Information
I have just spent three hours trawling through a clients market research reports. All nine. All bursting with customers self report around their preferences and behavioural likelihoods. What I am struggling to find is the insight; something that inspires innovative thinking and gives clear direction in creating a strategy, a plan or a design application.
The thing is, market research is evaluative. It leaves you in a place of absolute knowledge of the now, the status quo, but leaves you rudderless in determining your future action points. What distinguishes a customer insight from interesting customer information is applicability.
Business is about knowing what to do. Sitting amongst seemingly safe place of abundant market research can actually be a dangerous place of inertia. If your research fails to be generative and give clarity of action then, well, it’s just interesting information.
So how is it that an insight can possess such potency of application? Empathy. True insights are moments of truth, a brief opening into someone’s personal world. It is the ‘of course’ moment when you experience their subconscious everyday behavioural habits or totally get how they go about creating meaning in their world.
How do you know you have an insight? If you can describe a person’s mental model, their value system or experience goals you most likely have an insight. If this inspires you and generates a multitude of directions for your business, then it is most definitely an insight.
One of my more favourite insights is into the world of fast food. Eating chicken off the bone is a private moment. Now customers are not going to tell you that, but we can learn from the families who take their 30 piece pack to a hilltop and eat in their car. Sales are not down because of the product. Create an environment for your customers to discretely gorge themselves in and they will, again and again. ‘Of course’ you say, ‘so obvious’, but for how long have customers been forced to eat their chicken off the bone in open plan brightly lit fast food restaurants?
Look back over your research reports. Do you get that ‘of course’ insightful moment which ignites innovative action, or do you just have some interesting information?
I’ve just had a wonderfull vision of nightclub booths in dimly lit chicken restaraunts filled with families bonding over a primative gnawing session. I’d go. So long as they served bourbon and coke with the bird.
I worked in fast food and it’s a fact that the best time you can spend (other than out of your mind in bars) is talking to your customers and finding out what they really think. Not surveys involving ticking boxes, actually talking to them. You’re right though – it’s what you do with what they say that is important.
How often are important decisons made by the wrong person based on the wrong info. How much time, resource and cash is burned on a percieved need to “do” rather than understanding a need? A shit-ton.
For both the corporate with way too much cash and “research” and the start up with no cash and a ton of gut – it’s the same.
Those who live and breath the sector and the essence of the brand are incredibly important (the x factor that competitors usually desire infact)so don’t get me wrong. But, when you get the mixture of art, passion, science and truth right, you can really put the pedal to the metal. Things get easy. Even eating chicken in nightclubs.
Great post Sherryn.
…your chicken wings anecdote is finger lickin’ good.
Indeed, traditional market research is based on ‘self reported’ information and customer opinion, but seldomly based on the reality of their actual behavior, which people are notoriously unreliable at predicting.
The intimate nature of devouring fried chicken wouldn’t be something that would emerge from a focus group scenario.
As the old saying goes, If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they’d say “A faster Horse”.
At the start of a study into 3G Mobile TV, research participants almost unanimously declared there would be no reason for them to use the service when they were at home.
“Why would I watch that when I’ve got the big plasma in my living room?”, they told me.
…But after using the service for a week, one of the most popular contexts for watching TV on their mobile was actually whilst in bed.
I’m not sure many people would admit to eating fried chicken in bed while watching telly on their mobile, but without doubt, the only way to gain these types of insights is through understanding actual use …in context.
I like chicken!
“Gorge themselves, again and again … ” What do we know about the relationship between addiction and brand allegeance? I don’t ask this rhetorically. Really, what is the relationship?
Is there such a thing as brand addiction, such as where a clinical addiction to a particular substance can transfer to the supplier? And if I owned a brand to which customers were clinically addicted, would I care?
Sherryn,
Excellent points, particularly when you boil it down to applicability. Physicists call their version of this ‘applied physics.’
I wonder which is the better route to go — mining market research for insights, which we, as designers and strategists are often required to do, or replacing market research with ethnographic studies that rely strongly on contextual inquiry. The latter reverses the challenge posed by market research since it is built on the premise that insights reign, evaluative information just supports it.
@ Anrew: I’m finding ethnography works well in product and service design, because it allows me to study the role of the product/service in the life of the customer, so the insights go where the customer most values them.
Market research – both qual and quant – is pre-occupied with brand, which is ok so far as it goes, but it assumes people are lying to you when they say they love the product. “Nonsense” says the marketer. “You’re in love with the brand.”
Well, no, they don’t, even if perhaps the brand brokered the love in the early days.
Sherryn, for one, will attest the product superiority of her Mac till the end of time, eh Sherryn?
Hey James, “where the customer most values them” is music to my ears. I’d say that person-to-person passive inquiry yields 70% of your insights, and any market research that produces knowledge about brand strength yields another %15 of insights about how to PRD (if I may make up a verb) the larger findings.
At Intuit, I learned to subtract UI noise from my design solutions related to privacy and security because the Intuit brand is *built* on an unassailable reputation of privacy and security. Marketing and legal felt users were riddled with FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), so we designed for that, only to learn that the brand had already preempted such concerns.
In short, I think there’s room for both — and that they often complement each other quite nicely — but forcing one (market research) to produce the richness of the other (ethnography) may be cost-ineffective and illusory for paying clients. We have to do a better job of rationalizing that.