This cartoon is partly inspired by a classic quote attributed to David Ogilvy:
“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.”
That’s not to say that that market research isn’t important. But directly asking consumers what they want is inherently flawed. People don’t really know what they would do at the moment of purchase or why they do it.
And, thanks largely to the behavioral economics work of Daniel Kahneman, who died a couple weeks ago, we know that our decision-making in general is far less rational than we like to think.
As Daniel Kahneman put it:
“Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it but they’d prefer not to.”
Instead, how people think is guided mostly by a System 1 mode of thought: fast, instinctive, and emotional. The System 2 mode of thought that is slower, deliberative, and logical is usually playing catch-up — often rationalizing decisions we’ve already made by gut feel.
As Zig Ziglar famously said:
“People buy on emotion and justify on logic.”
I once took a course with HBS professor Gerald Zaltman, who estimates that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious.
Gerard created a research tool called the ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) as one way to try to surface insights from what is subconscious. Respondents bring in photos that represent their thoughts and feelings about a topic, and then are interviewed about what comes up.
In the class, we all tried the technique out on each other. The results were fascinating, but sometimes felt a little like armchair psychiatry ink blot tests and trying to read tea leaves. It was also subject to our own biases and motivations.
A lot of market research works that way. We have to apply our own judgement on how literally to interpret it. Nothing will give us 100% confidence in advance. The most reliable market research is often what you find out in-market.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
