I’ve always been fascinated with how marketing teams make decisions, particularly how they try to tap into consumer insights.
Any form of consumer research is an inexact science. Focus group glass can distort insights like a fun house mirror. It can easily be shaped by the team’s own biases and politics. Quotes can be cherry-picked to support a predetermined decision. Ad hoc comments can be given too much weight or taken too literally.
When I worked at General Mills, our agency partners would sometimes jokingly refer to the focus groups held in a suburb of our Minneapolis headquarters as the “Oracles of Eden Prairie” because so much stock was placed in literal comments made by the groups.
At the other extreme, executives can ignore research altogether. When I worked with Google years ago on a project, they described one of the problems of business decision-making as paying too much attention to the HiPPO — the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.”
It reminds me of a quote from Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape:
“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine!”
The beauty brand Glossier once re-imagined consumer research techniques by inviting 1,000 of their top consumers to an exclusive Slack channel, directly attended by members of their product development team. Slack is not really a consumer channel, but it worked. Instead of a one-off focus group, the Slack channel operated continuously with ongoing insights on products in development. Glossier partly credits that Slack channel with the development of one of its most successful products — a conditioning face wash called Milky Jelly Cleanser.
Ultimately, the best research is only as good as how a team interprets the findings.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
