The Next Engine: Beyond Campaign Thinking

This is the true story of seven strangers, recruited to sit in an audio and video bugged gray room and have their lives videotaped for 90 minutes while they engage in meaningless and uninspired conversation. They’ll be challenged to share their real and personal points of view, one by one, one after another, all in a line. The point of this exercise is to at some point, stop being polite, and start getting real.

Well, as real as one can get in a bugged gray room, with strangers, in an office park, 20-30 minutes outside of town, after being paid $200.

Welcome to consumer research.

The next time you are experiencing buyer’s remorse for that sexy pair of boots you just had to have or maybe when you can’t take anymore commercial interruptions before exploding, remember that all of those things were decided by an anonymous panel of your peers in a major metro market that is totally representative of everyone — and specifically, you.

I’ve just sat through three days of this crap with two different clients, both of which having very smart people working for them. The GD focus group is the death of insight and research. I cannot believe that in a world where at any given time 40 people are chatting about the performance and shelf life of a Dirt Devil hepa filter, there is an alarming absence of real decision makers chiming in. (That means that most marketing and product development people don’t understand how to use the Internet.)

If you haven’t read Freakonomics, read it. It’s controversial, thought provoking and makes most people feel a bit uncomfortable. Like I said, read it. In the introduction, there’s a great passage about the sharp reduction in teenage crime that happened during the 90s. Conventional wisdom (driven by focus groups with past and current criminals, law enforcement folks and politicians) attributed this new age of less crime to more cops on the streets, tougher restrictions and better education policies.

Conventional wisdom had it all wrong. These researchers didn’t use culture or any degree of “macro-thinking” as part of their discovery. Nor did they use any meaningful data. I don’t want to spoil the book, you really should read it, but here’s what happened. If you look at the places where teenage crime was most likely to occur in the late 70s and early 80s, and then compare the crime rates of those same cities in the 90s, you’ll find the largest declines. What really happened? Abortion became legal and had relatively high usage in those very same cities. Like I said, read the book, my ramblings wouldn’t give it justice.

This post isn’t about how bad consumer research is. It’s more about how bad consumer researchers are. Simply, these so called experts are ignoring the most important facet of their jobs, applying human culture to solve real problems. Academia and moderately intelligent people created “consumer research” and made millions. They segmented behavior into buying and non-buying. But they were (and are) wrong. You need to look at human culture and macro data trends, then identify the key questions you have to answer, and go solve them on a micro level, by observing and participating in real cultural interactions and then reapply them to a macro scenario. Don’t simulate it, go do it live. If you want to see how important clothes are to a worker, go work with them for a day. If you want to understand why people in Pheonix aren’t happy with your service, go try to use your service in Pheonix.

Now is the time where I plug the digital space as being the answer to all of your problems. I think I could do my entire job as a cultural researcher without ever interacting with anyone in person. I really think I could. I wouldn’t want to, but I could. And in doing so, I’d be better than 80% of existing market researchers. Social media is providing such a huge opportunity to understand how people really think about you; and only a small group are taking advantage of it. Right now, I’m using forums to test a hypothesis, identity product testers and track wireless service in Scottsdale. And the best part, I’m not paying anyone to do it. I get larger samples, unbiased opinions — and if I find someone really insightful, I can email them and create direct and personal conversation.

So here is my pledge. No more focus groups for me or my clients.  Never again. Take your current focus group budget, invest it in some targeted ethnography and dump the rest into training your team on social media. Call us, we’d be happy to help.