StemCell Therapy

In the book "Blind Spot: Illuminating the Hidden Value in Business," authors Nathan Shedroff and Stephen Diller tell a story that perfectly dramatizes the problem with todays over-reliance on quantitative data.

Years ago, a team at Levis was researching customer segments and became puzzled over something: While the brand is upscale, many of its customers are not. To find out what was going on, the team took a road trip in Texas and visited people in their homes. One of them was a single mother with two kids, Francine, who was clearly struggling. Yet every year, she bought Levis for her family.

The obvious assumption would be that she was vain and irresponsible. But when they met her, they learned she worked two jobs and was obsessed with her childrens future. Asked why she chose to spend precious dollars on Levis, she replied that she didnt want her children to think they were poor and couldnt achieve more in life.

This story serves as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks that data alone is a sufficient tool to understand human behavior. Not every person fits into a neat category.

Qualitative methodologies can tell you the what (that lower income people buy Levis), but they often fail to tell you why (because theyre aspirational). They cant tell you what motivates the large part of Pradas customer base, which is not affluent. Or why many high-income people shop at big-box discount stores. Is it convenience, or because they dont like overpaying? Only qualitative research will tell.

For decades, however, qualitative research has had a bad rap. It has largely meant focus groups, which can be a costly hassle. You have to recruit respondents, conduct interviews, and travel to different citiesall of which seem time-consuming and antiquated compared to statistical analysis of a rich data set. Product strategists and executives crave insight, but they dont extend that desire to home visits, shop-alongs, and other person-on-the-street work. As a result, in the last 10 years qualitative research facilities have been closing, and quick-turn panels and mobile phone surveys have taken the place of traditional, on-the-ground methods.

But if we want to reach customers in an authentic way, we have to understand the true psychological motivation behind their behaviors. And luckily, we have some new and sophisticated ways to do just that:

Watch what people do, not just what they say. Behavioral economics has opened a new field for understanding human motivation. For example, many behavioral economists stress that quick and effortless, "System 1" thinking dominates the choices we make. The majority of people,most of the time, operate on autopilot. As a result, observing how they actually shop for things can provide deep inspiration for new services that improve store performance. For example, Newsworks award-winning "How People Buy" study literally looked through the eyeglasses of people shopping. It revealed, oddly enough, that many customers do research, not to find the best product, but to ensure that they wont regret buying their preferred brand!

Co-create, dont just evaluate. Research projects typically seek to evaluate concepts and pick a winner. A better idea is to bring people in early, and use their responses to influence design thinking. For example, innovative research firm System 1 Group seeks to improve ideas by putting emotional responses at the heart of their testing methods. This allows their customers (or potential customers) to help build on product concepts, not just evaluate them.

Get outside to understand your category. Person-on-the-street interviews have come a long way in sophistication. Today, production companies such as Snippies offer networks of professional videographers who can generate fast global feedback. Such surveys can give you insight into how people feel about products and brands, helping you move beyond the limitations of traditional tracking surveys and social listening data.

Of course, we know that data big and small isnt going anywhere. With more sources of it and better analytic methodologies, business leaders are finding it easier and easier to extract value from data. But that is only part of the storyand not always the most important part.

Compelling insights and competitive advantage still come from getting out into the world to observe, converse and create with people. While positive results may not be as assured, the insights we can learn are essentialif we want to find out what really matters to our customers.

Brandon Geary is global chief strategy officer of Possible.

See the rest here:
Look again: How to fight data blindness - Campaign US

This entry was posted on April 18, 2017 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |