Think you know what customers want? Don’t be so sure.
I’ve been researching people and how they engage with products and services for 13 years. I’ve hung out with New Yorkers as they planned their cruise holidays. I’ve observed the highly ritualised Japanese business culture, and the way people operate within it. I’ve even explored what lunch in a canteen means to marine engineers in Newcastle.
Suffice it to say, I’ve immersed myself in the everyday worlds of a lot of people, and have observed with wonder interactions that are so familiar they’re conducted without thought or reflection. These small, and seemingly inconsequential moments of everyday engagement actually reveal deep truths about the people I study. By observing them as a whole, rather than trying to measure aspects of what they do, I’m able to understand how their beliefs, values and emotions affect their relationships with products, services, and the world around them. I like to think of this as finding the magic in the mundane.
My fascination with these small instances of interaction has allowed me to build something that is unusual in modern business culture: a deep understanding of human experiences. You might be saying to yourself “That’s not so unusual, my organisation knows a lot about customer experience too.” Well, don’t be so sure. Let’s look at the flaws in how many organisations view and try to understand people.
A narrow and shallow view of people
When I first meet with organisations they typically talk about people as customers, which reveals immediately the reductive way they view human beings. They’re only interested in the consumer dimension of people, and are trying to decipher our past purchasing and product use behaviour to predict how best to fulfil our wants, needs and desires.
This, predictably, gives a very narrow view of people, because it doesn’t take into account aspects of their being that can’t be categorised as ‘consumer’ behaviour. There are all kinds of emotional and situational factors that influence our behaviour as consumers, that are often ignored because they don’t neatly fit an organisation’s view of what consumption is.
Safety in numbers? Don’t count on it.
This consumer-centric view of people is also largely built upon quantitative data. Sales data, brand trackers, NPS scores, digital analytics, and customer preference, perception and satisfaction surveys are just some of the data sources that organisations use. Typically, that information will then feed into a set of customer segments; quirkily named groupings of consumer attributes, designed to distinguish different types of customers.
This emphasis on using quantitative data to understand people isn’t surprising. The dominant business culture in the industrialised world is anchored in the concept that business management is a hard science. The central belief is that measurement and objectivity are key to operational predictability and consistent delivery of products and services. Using what’s measurable about customers to understand them fits neatly within this cultural norm of the business world, but it gives a very thin description of who people are and what drives their behaviour. The ‘people’ captured in segments don’t exist, they’re simply caricatures of purchasing and product usage blended with demographic data. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to think there’s a little more to me as a person than the products I buy or how much I earn.
The persistent power of measuring customers
You might be wondering why, if the typical organisational view of people is so narrow and thin, do companies persist in relying so heavily on measuring their consumption behaviour to understand them?
In the context of day-to-day decision-making, these concise descriptions of consumer behaviour are perfectly adequate for making operational assessments such as appropriate staffing levels or what media placements to buy. The problem arises when organisations try to use these same descriptions to imagine what the future might hold. By believing that valuable information only comes from measurement, organisations are unwittingly constricting themselves. To quote Tricia Wang, the world-renowned ethnographer:
“We have made a mistake in conflating computational data with explanatory knowledge.”
Human beings are complex and irrational. Even the most rational of decisions is driven at a subconscious level by our emotions, and is heavily influenced by context and situation. Because emotional dynamics and the effects of context and situation operate below the threshold of our consciousness, we can rarely articulate clearly to someone else how they are influencing us. This makes it very difficult to meaningfully characterise people and their experiences through measurement alone. Trying to reduce customers to a series of fixed data points is therefore only useful up to a certain point, because it misses the beliefs, values and emotions that distinguish who they are. It doesn’t take into account the events and cultural shifts that influence beliefs and behaviour, and that should therefore be guiding the future of the organisation. Without these insights -the kind of insights that inspire innovations — organisations can become irrelevant to their customers, and limit profit for their shareholders.
Breathing life into project briefs
When I start a project with a client, it always begins with research. Inevitably the client will tell me that they know lots about their customers, that we can keep the research light and just get down to business designing the product or service they’ve decided is critical to their success.
The challenge is that most of my work is about helping clients imagine their futures. The knowledge they have of their customers is undoubtedly useful to them in their daily operations, but it does not equate to a deep understanding of the people they want to design for. It says very little about latent needs or untapped opportunities, and often results in predictable and unimaginative project briefs. “We’ve seen a drop-off in the use of our product by X segment, so we need to add Y feature to our service to be more appealing to them. We’d like you to take a user-centric approach by testing the appeal of the features with our customers as you design them.” These kinds of challenges, whilst parading as customer-centric endeavours, are in fact highly rational business-centric challenges. I don’t say that to be cruel, it’s simply my experience.
Once I’ve reviewed the relevant information a client has got, I like to ask them a few challenging questions about the people they want me and my colleagues to design for. Generally, these questions are enough to gently highlight the gaps in their understanding, which can in turn help a client to see the value of giving us the time and space to do our own discovery research.
What is discovery research?
Discovery research, as you may have already guessed, is an exploration of the experiences of people in their everyday context. It’s done without hypothesis, in order to understand the nuanced qualities and drivers of these human experiences. Discovery research focuses on the familiar; the routines and practices that people have developed for engaging with the products, services and people that make up their worlds. It seeks to understand how people relate to the products and services that they use, and how these relationships and routines embody the beliefs and values that drive their behaviour, attitudes and opinions.
It’s impossible for us to know in advance what a discovery research project will uncover, but this kind of open inquiry always results in new perspectives and stories about the people you’re trying to design for. The insights delivered by discovery research can reframe project challenges, and inspire the inventive thinking central to innovation projects.
To give you an example, several years ago I was working on a project for a contract catering firm. The firm provides staff canteens to companies of all shapes and sizes, and asked me to help them find ways to create a more engaging experience for the employees who used their canteens. Their belief going into the project was that they were already selling quality food, and that all they needed was a mobile app to showcase their menus. They had surveys and food trend reports coming out of their ears, all of which informed the type of fare they offered, but this data told them very little about the experience of eating in their canteens, or about food culture in the workplace more broadly.
Our project team convinced the client to let us carry out some discovery research by observing meal times in a variety of their staff canteens. One of our key insights, and something that became clear very early on, was that lunch was about much more than food alone. It was about social connection — something that the canteens we observed were not able to facilitate, because they were set up to serve individuals rather than groups.
Armed with our insights, the company realised they had got the focus of the project all wrong. They needed to become more meaningfully connected to the social aspects of lunch, and to make the food service area more conducive to serving groups instead of just individuals. An app that contained that day’s menu items and special offers wasn’t going to create the engagement they craved.
I’m not suggesting that you must immediately go out and embark on a discovery research project. In most day-to-day situations, the deep understanding of people that it delivers would be largely redundant. However for anyone trying to imagine what’s next for their organisation, taking the time and effort to truly understand your consumers will give you the power to create unique products and services that they truly love.
