Light bulb moment

Does your business do market research? Does it find it helpful and useful?

David Ogilvy, the guru of Mad Men everywhere, once opined that ‘the trouble with market research is that consumers don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say’.

You may also have come across a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect. This has absolutely nothing do with market research per se but does provide some insight into how people think and behave.

And note the key word here-‘people’. Too often in marketing  we use words like ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ which hides the reality that we are serving people, with all their biases, prejudices and irrationalities.

In essence the Hawthorn Effect is derived from a series of psychological experiments from the 1920s at the Hawthorn Works, a light bulb factory, to determine if changes to the heating, lighting and other environmental factors made workers more or less productive. It found that workers' productivity seemed to improve when any changes were made and slumped when the study was concluded. This suggested that the productivity gain occurred because the workers knew they were being monitored and it was this factor which biased the results rather than the changes themselves.

And maybe this is why David O said what he said. Maybe all market research is influenced in the same way. Maybe people in a drive to be helpful provide answers and explanations to the market researchers that a) they think they want to hear and/or b) which are rational when in reality they act irrationally.

Having sat behind the mirror in numerous focus groups and listened to more research presentations than are strictly necessary, it is clear few research programmes show a real understanding of how people’s brains work.

Maybe we need fewer market researchers speaking with and listening to people, and more psychologists.

For as people we are far more intuitive, emotional and impulsive when we pass judgement and make decisions than we like to admit. Impulsivity is by far a more common human trait than calculation. We are Systems 1 people. And academic studies in cognitive psychology tell us that people take the ‘Systems 1’, automatic, route 90% of the time and then we often engage our ‘Systems 2’, considered, brain to post-rationalise our instinctive decision.

Traditional market research studies have a tendency to uncover our System 2 response. Not our System 1 response. And this is why market research findings can often be meaningless, useless and highly misleading unless we can find a way to disentangle these responses to get to the truth, if there is indeed a truth.

And why do people not engage their brains when making decisions? Why are we more instinctive than we will admit? Because if we relied on System 2 thinking all the time we would never make a decision.

The world is a complex place and because we are constantly bombarded with too much information and stimuli we find short cuts. And this why we do we what we do.

These short cuts and rule of thumb strategies shorten decision making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about what we should do next.

Instead we take the default option and do what we have always done or is the least troublesome thing to do. We do what flatters and massages our ego. We do what everyone else is doing. We do the first thing that comes into our head.

Research rarely uncovers that sort of thing. And yet as marketers we commission research project after project to convince ourselves we are meeting a customer need; or to show our bosses that we have listened to customers; or to protect our backsides. What a waste.

Instead of listening to what people say we should find ways to observe what they do and apply a knowledge and understanding of psychology to test and determine reasons why. Far more insightful.

Or alternatively find a way to explore consumer reaction just as they flip from System 1 to System 2 thinking, as they transition from the unconscious to the conscious.

So how much money do you waste on market research? Found out anything useful?