Innovation Reactor

The Mad Men approach to customer research

In an episode of Mad Men, the Execs at Sterling Cooper Advertising round up a herd of eager secretaries to test out a new line of lipsticks for Belle Jolie, a cosmetics company. 

On the other side of the two-way mirror, the men enjoy the show as the girls apply different shades and answer questions. But the men gawk and joke at how the girls don’t know why they buy what they buy, and that research is a complete waste of time.

What’s surprising today is how many companies still use the same approach as advertising agencies from the 1960’s. Burning time and money on research designed for a different era.

If the Internet and social media have transformed the way that consumers shop, and technology is blurring the lines between online and offline commerce, isn’t it inevitable that our customer research techniques should change too? 

From my observation traditional research is stuck in the past and companies need to adopt new methods. Here's why:

Traditional research

• Focus groups, surveys and structured interviews
• Tries to uncover explicit customer needs
• Uses market segmentation based on demographics
• Takes place in controlled settings with expensive rooms, equipment and moderators
• Analyzes objective data
• Good for improving existing things
• Static and slow – one city or survey at a time

New research techniques

• Focused on individuals
• Uses observation and empathy
• Happens in natural contexts and through attentively viewing people’s behavior in their own environment
• Uses feelings, thoughts, attitudes, imagination and emotion to uncover latent needs
• Promotes dynamic conversations to generate interpretations and deeper meanings
• Fast, rapid, responsive, and low cost
• Inspires new ideas and opportunities 

Madison Ave in the 60’s is a far cry from the world we live in today. Nowadays understanding individual users through observation and empathy is critical to unlock new product ideas or to create effective marketing programs.  

 

High-Velocity Product Testing

Innovators are always planting new product ideas. They start with a seed and try to grow it into a big, tall and beautiful tree. But often, instead of designing a strong trunk and branches first, they immediately start arranging the leaves.

Here’s a product development tip: build the trunk and branches first, then quickly let customers climb all over them.

The idea is to design and test the main parts of your product early-on and observe actual customer behavior, rather than just listening to what customers say or say they will do.

I’m a fan of high-velocity product testing. This means you get a prototype of the product or the experience into beta, get customer usage data on features or functionality, get information on customer experience pain-points, make adjustments, and then get the next version out fast.

Testing an actual product, with real users in their natural environment, is the foundation of developing something consumers will love. Because the real learning does not start in focus groups or through online surveys, but when you begin reviewing your first set of customer behavior data.

It’s amazing how many great ideas fall flat once they're in live testing, and how the unexpected things become winners. 

 

What is ideation?

What do Hollywood Director JJ Abrams, singer and songwriter Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics, Twitter CEO Evan Williams, and Melinda Gates – who oversees the worlds largest philanthropic organization – have in common? They all made the Fast Company Magazine, 100 Most Creative People in Business list. 

But what makes them so creative and innovative? What's behind the next Sci-Fi blockbuster, the words for a hit new song, a global social network, or improved heath and education in the developing world? The answer is simple – ideas.

The Most Creative People in Business have an abundant source of good ideas. The great thing is you can develop this capability too. 

If you want to out-innovate the competition you first need to out-think them. Ideation is the process of generating, exploring, and evaluating new ideas that can give your business a competitive advantage.

Just imagine ideation as a funnel. Insights, views, opinions, data, trends, and knowledge, are captured at the top. Then these elements are filtered in the middle to get the good stuff – new ideas – out the other side. 

There are four key steps in the ideation process:

1. Gather customer insights: Review customer research reports, analyze competitors, social trends, lifestyle patterns, and shopping habits. Search blogs, social networks, and customer service records. Conduct a number of contextual interviews (in-home, in-office, in-mall) with your target customers to understand their behavior in an everyday environment.
2. Find opportunity areas: Look for customer pain-points, problems, inefficient processes, or abnormal behavior. Give these areas names since these themes will serve as vehicles for exploring and developing new ideas. 
3. Brainstorm ideas: Create actionable design statements around your opportunity areas like "How might we improve our product delivery times?" or "What can improve our online user experience?" to provide stimulus and guidelines for brainstorming. Start generating lots of ideas, make sure these ideas are grounded by your customer insights and go for quantity.
4. Prioritize ideas: Develop some customer criteria like "Does this idea improve customers lives?"or "Is the idea different from what customers are using today?" and business criteria like "Does this idea build on the strengths of our core business model?" to help evaluate, rank and select the best ideas.

The 100 Most Creative People in Business have the knack of being able to repeat this process again and again to generate fresh ideas. However even the best can get lost and lose focus so here are a few things to watch out for:

• Ideation is not about defining solutions – ideation is about thinking and learning.
• Ideation is not about brilliant strategies – ideation is about exploration and direction setting.
• Ideation is not about creating advertising tag lines or flashy marketing – ideation is about understanding customer experiences.

 

Outliers: on the edge of innovation

With a spiky pink mohawk she stands at 5ft 7". Wearing a short burberry skirt, army boots, and biker jacket; outfitted with the latest GPS system and night-vision lenses, she explores dramatic ruins of power stations, crumbling psychiatric hospitals, abandoned missile silos, and rusted subway systems. She ignores the no trespassing signs in other forbidden places. As an expert in the new extreme sport of urban exploration, she supplies maps and advice to a whole underground community of dedicated adventurers.

 

In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell writes about people with "expertise outside of the ordinary." While puzzling to the rest of us, he found these humans are not a one-off phenomena. Rather, expertise comes not only from talent, but also from practice, hard work, rehearsal, many hours of experience, and seizing opportunity.

 

Outliers can be thought of as extreme users. People ahead-of-the-curve who define trends, patterns and popular culture. When developing new products, they are vital for customer research, since they have a disproportionate influence on technology, fashion and social behavior.

 

Extreme users are found at opposite ends of the curve. On a bell curve it's the points located farthest from the middle. Here you'll find either lovers or haters of your products, or what the marketing gurus call "early adopters" or "brand rejectors" respectively.

 

But shouldn't we be talking to the mass market since this is where the money is? Well to understand a flock of sheep you want to talk to the shepherd.

 

Extreme users decode the world around them differently. They use technology in new ways and have different perspectives on reality. These people are often fanatical and go to greater lengths in habit, action or opinion, so acquire better knowledge about their areas of interest than most others. These consumers can articulate their needs more vividly, while the masses in the middle, with limited exposure to your products have trouble. By focusing customer research on extreme users you can then extract a richer source of information.

 

So next time you notice a guy with blond dreadlocks and ripped jeans, who's into freestyle motocross, kitesurfing, rock climbing, 2000ft cliff jumps into deep ravines, and body armor before breakfast, look past the painful scars. Because he's probably the perfect candidate for your research on high-definition cameras, outdoor apparel, social networking and emergency healthcare (of course).