market research Cartoons

Customer Personas

Customer Personas cartoon

Marketers use have long used personas as a tool to try to bring customers into the room — to help organizations be more customer-centric. They’re intended to help with everything from innovation to experience design to marketing and sales. A software engineer named Alan Cooper is credited with creating the first persona in 1985. Looking for a better way to design software, he invented “Kathy” as a synthesis of all of the customer interviews he’d made. Ogilvy later popularized personas as a marketing tool in the mid-90s. At their best, personas can help visualize and communicate insights from research. But […]

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Market Research Pitfalls

Market Research Pitfalls cartoon

Early in my marketing career, at General Mills, we used to hold focus groups in a Minneapolis suburb called Eden Prairie. I once overheard a couple of our agency partners jokingly refer to this focus group ritual as going to see the “Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Whether new products, campaign strategy, or ad creative, the Oracles of Eden Prairie had major sway.  Focus groups (and all the rest of our market research tools) were imperfect, mysterious, expensive, and seemingly took forever, but they were the best we had at the time.  Market research is one of the areas of marketing […]

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Market Research

Market Research cartoon

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 […]

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