The Hindu Business Line : Consumer insights: Getting beyond the myths

Marketing is responsible for stimulating consumer demand; hence genuine consumer understanding is the first prerequisite for superior marketing. As markets become more crowded, the marketer who has superior insights into the consumers’ latent o r unmet needs, wants, desires and beliefs gains a critical source of competitive advantage. Thus, no one can dispute that gaining better consumer insight is a must for new age marketers. However, as is the case with all good intentions, the trouble begins when people start translating intent into practice, and this is visible when we examine the state of the art today. It seems to me here are five prevalent myths that act as powerful blocks in the quest for gaining competitive advantage through superior consumer insight.

Myth 1: “I know the consumer – she is my wife, mother, sister, daughter, cousin, and friend”

This myth is strongly believed by successful entrepreneurs who have grown their business idea, who scoff at all formal consumer research and refuse to invest any significant amounts in consumer research. It is a myth because most consumer products and brands have a large and diverse user base that is nothing like the entrepreneur’s circle of family and friends. Their living conditions and product usage contexts bear no relationship to the lifestyles of the wealthy entrepreneur or his MBA marketing team. That is why the first step to getting powerful insights lies in observing the real consumers of the category and brand in their real life conditions.

At the other end of the spectrum are the marketing teams at large multinational firms which have huge budgets for consumer research at their disposal. They fall prey to another set of four myths.

Myth 2: “Consumer speak = consumer insight”

One school of thought believes that any expression of consumer need, desire or belief is valid only if it is voiced by the consumer and hence must be written in consumer-speak. Thus, all insight statements must be of the form, “I wish...”

This is a myth because it is based on the false premise that people know what they want, why they do what they do, do what they say and say what they do. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of human nature and psychology knows that the reverse is true. People are famously inconsistent – they think one thing, say another and go and do something else entirely. And that is when they are not lying and they genuinely believe they are telling you the truth as they see it. That’s why powerful insights can really only be intuited by an observer, aided by good questioning.

Myth 3: “If it hasn’t been revealed by the Rorschach Ink blot test, it isn’t an insight”

The opposite school of thought relies on the latest, cleverest testing methods devised by lauded professors of psychology and social anthropology. Wanting to break free from the banal, from the well-established human truths of a product category, believing that people can’t articulate why they do what they do, marketers transfer their faith to esoteric methods. This mindset results in the kind of study that subjects rural women in Punjab to hypnosis to get them to reveal why they switched from one brand of shampoo to another. When it comes to insights, insatiable curiosity to get under the skin of the consumer is more helpful than fancy techniques.

Myth 4: “Gaining insight into consumers’ needs and desires is akin to getting an idea – it’s all about that flash of inspiration”

Those who believe this myth maintain that there can be no method for getting to powerful insights. If the marketer is lucky, he will be struck by a flash of inspiration and the insight will pop up in his mind. There is nothing he can do except be patient and wait and hope for the best. This is a myth because there are methods for insights just as even the most creative artists develop their own methods and don’t just sit waiting for inspiration.

Myth 5: “Quantity leads to quality”

This one came about because senior marketers began asking their internal consumer insight managers, their ad agency and research agency partners to “churn” out insights. “We need large quantities of insights to feed into all of the marketing activities – new product concepts, ads, events and activation programmes.” This in turn led the consumer insight experts to devise methods to generate insights in numbers. Naturally, they drew inspiration from the well established methods of creative thinking and idea generation.

However, this belief is a myth when it comes to insights because insights and ideas are fundamentally different things. Insights are about re-perceiving the familiar while ideas are about re-connecting known elements in fresh ways.

So, how can marketers get past the myths and find the real thing? The good news is there are a set of simple principles and practices which yield good results. These are

(a) observing consumers in their real lives and usage situations.

(b) exercising empathy to walk in their shoes and

The TRIO test will reveal whether the insights thus intuited are powerful or not. Four simple criteria constitute the test: Is it a human Truth? Is it Relevant to the task at hand? Is it Inspiring to the teams which have to use it? Is it Open still or over-used and over-exploited by other brands in the category?

(Hamsini Shivakumar is Founding Partner, Leapfrog Strategy Consulting.)

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