Observe...

To perceive; take notice.  To watch attentively.  To make a systematic observation of.

I'm reminded of a line from one of my favorite movies, Being There, when Peter Sellers' character, Chauncey Gardiner, proclaims "I like to watch."  Though his comment was misinterpreted, he was referring to television.

As marketers, we should all like watching.  I wrote about listening in a recent post, but watching might be even more important when it comes to understanding customers' unmet needs - the revelations that lead to innovations, differentiation and growth.  This week, I had the opportunity to meet and hear Tom Kelley, one of the leaders of the product design firm Ideo and author of The Ten Faces of Innovation.  He said that the most important personality type for innovation is the anthropologist...the person who simply watches what customers do and, in the process, uncovers hidden gems - like the fact that little kids want thick-handled toothbrushes - not thin - because of the way they hold it.  I've heard the CEO of John Deere talk about how using this same approach of ethnography led to breakthroughs in farming equipment.

Truth is, people aren't good at telling you what they need.  They can tell you what they don't like, they can react to prototypes and they can always tell you they want a lower price.  But when you ask them to describe a need they didn't know they had, they can't do it.  For incremental changes, continue with the focus groups.  For the quantum leaps, you don't have to look further than your own customers. 

--Dave 

Comments

[Kim]

I find the observation that the anthropologist is the best framework through which to discover customer needs interesting. After all, the great leap that allowed humans to succeed as a species was/is their ability to learn and transfer that knowledge economically through language. And at the heart of learning is observation.

Sometimes, I think we have become enamored with quantitative research over qualitative methodologies. It is easier to justify buying market research with lots of numbers rather than succinct insight gaining through hours of observation. Numbers have a role and it's great when tracking changes over time. But it seems out of balance in today's marketing organizations. Marketing has always been uncomfortable with its roots in socials sciences, especially when confronted with 'hard' science rooted finance/accounting and engineering colleagues. The inevitable question asked in a meeting is "can you quantify that for me?". Surely a sense of magnitude is called for but the nugget from behavior observation is in the insight. Could you quantify the observation of one monkey of another that it could use a stick to dip into the ant hill and come out with a protein rich snack?

So I leave with a quote from one of the biggest quant jocks: “We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them” - Albert Einstein