“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
This quote, often attributed to Henry Ford, is the perfect critique of consumer research. It is a dismissal of the consumer mindset, inferring that people fundamentally lack the imagination, self-understanding and foresight to give clear direction to decision-making. If you take what your customer says at face value, you’ll never truly cut through and give them what they really need.
More recently, this is an argument that Jon Cohen has persuasively put forward in his book, Asking for Trouble. With 25 years’ experience in conducting consumer research, Cohen knows a thing or two about asking the right questions and interpreting the answers. He warns that the world of consumer research is riddled with pitfalls, illusions and untruths. It is not that our customers deliberately mislead us when we ask them their opinions; it is simply that it’s not natural for them to so deeply interrogate their thoughts, feelings and motivations. Their responses are, by default, also unnatural.
When Cohen presented his argument at a recent all-company Hunter meeting, it got us thinking: what role should customer research really play in guiding brand and product decisions?
On the surface, Cohen’s arguments are enough to trigger an existential crisis in any strategist. At Hunter, we place a lot of importance on consumer research, preferring to ask people directly what they’re looking for, why they’re looking for it, and how they’re going about finding it. It removes the guesswork, and particularly in the world of property, it helps us to profile who might be interested in a product before it’s even been built.
However, Cohen is right in saying that consumer research doesn’t always provide a direct line to the truth. Rather, what we tend to hear in research is a version of people’s ‘own’ truths. In the invented world of the focus group or in-depth interview, people present to us a version of themselves that is slightly distorted. For example, they may tell us sustainable living is a priority to them (well I do recycle…); or they insist they’d be perfectly happy living next door to an affordable housing block (well I wouldn’t want to sound like a snob…). They’re not lying to us per se; they just don’t want us to judge them.
Our problem continues when we ask people what they think of names and logos. Particularly in the property sector, there is a reality that people tend not to consciously engage with branding. Of course, place-brands have an impact on how people feel about a place, but rarely do people actively think about it until we ask. In Cohen’s words, the act of asking creates an ‘illusion of interest’, in which our participants focus on questions that would never occur to them in the real world. If we’re asking them which of three development names stands out to them most, we should first ask them to recall a development name that’s stood out to them in real life. Very often, this question has our participants scratching their heads: they cannot recall a single development name. And it is this lack of answer that is perhaps more insightful than the answers that come after.
So what does all of this mean for the world of consumer research? Should we abandon ship? We would answer, absolutely not.
At Hunter, we believe that asking people what they think is central to success. Without regularly checking in with consumers, we can become divorced from what their everyday challenges, priorities and requirements are. Especially in the year that we’ve just had, consumer needs are changing – and we can’t know exactly how, unless we ask. We must, however, exercise caution in the way we ask the questions, and how we interpret the answers.
Take our sustainable living question, for example. Nine times out of ten, if we ask a participant how important sustainability is in their new home, they’ll tell us, very important. It is then essential that we qualify this; what are their priorities when it comes to sustainability? How do they go about checking whether a home is ‘sustainable’?[1] The answers to these questions are truly informative. By the way that the participant responds, we can gauge the extent to which they’ve really engaged with the topic before the interview. Do they have an informed opinion of what ‘sustainable’ really means; or do they say something vague about recycling, dodge the question, and move on? Often, we hear the latter.
Crucially, it’s important that we only ever use consumer research for illumination, never allowing customers to make our decisions for us. Even if we’re finding that home-buyers’ engagement with sustainability is only skin-deep, it doesn’t mean that sustainability shouldn’t be a business priority. Rather, it means that our customers need an easy route in: they want to wear the label of ‘sustainable’, without making decisions or accepting compromises. That is a clearer steer.
Similarly, if we see a particular development name perform well during research, that doesn’t mean we should simply allow customers to choose it for us. What’s important is that we understand why it performed well: did participants find it appealing; did they say it stood out to them; did they say they liked the back story? To return to Cohen’s argument, in the make-believe world of consumer research, participants can find it difficult to know exactly how they’d react to a name in real life. It’s up to us to listen carefully to their reasoning, and decide for ourselves whether it holds up. For example, if a name is liked purely for its back story, it’s worth remembering that this story may not be communicated the first time customers see the name. Indeed, if a name is rejected because it was unusual and made our participants feel a little uncomfortable, that may well a strong reason to choose it.
Conducting consumer research is certainly not without its challenges and pitfalls. Intentionally or not, customers mislead us. It takes careful asking and careful listening to get to the bottom of what people really mean. However, when it comes to understanding mindsets, priorities and everyday needs, there is no replacement for speaking directly to customers.
After all, even Henry Ford had something to learn from his customers. If they said they wanted faster horses, then there is an insight there: they wanted to get around more quickly. It was up to Ford – as it is up to us now – to decide exactly how to make that happen.
[1] This is an interrogative technique called ‘The Five Whys’, frequently used the research we conduct at Hunter. According to this principle, we qualify a response with at least five questions, in order to get to the root cause of customers’ feelings and responses.
At Hunter, we have a team of strategists trained in moderating and conducting consumer research. If you’d like to learn more about your customers and their needs, get in touch.
