Have you ever told someone you were going to the gym and then not gone? Have you ever told yourself you were going to eat healthy this week, only to find yourself pouring pizza down your throat? Have you ever mumbled “I’ll never drink again” on a painful Saturday morning, only to mutter the same thing the Saturday after?
If you answered “yes” to any of these, congratulations; you are a normal human being. People are terrible at predicting their own behavior, and this is critical for anyone who is starting a business, testing an idea, or launching a new product.
Two Psychologists, Emily Balcetis and David Dunning, ran a sequence of studies that showed that people are terrible at predicting their own behavior but relatively good at predicting other people’s behavior. For example, people predicted that others were 22% less likely to help clean-up jigsaw pieces when in a group than when alone. The actual number was 27%.
When it came to predicting their behavior, the same people believed that being in a group wouldn’t make any difference to whether they picked up the jigsaw pieces. Balcetis and Dunning’s conclusion was that this was because when predicting our own behavior, we don’t account for the context that surrounds our actions, while we do account for context when predicting the actions of others. This study isn’t the only one to highlight how bad we are at predicting our own behavior; there’s a whole field of research around biases, such as the introspection illusion and illusory superiority. All of this evidence makes basing business decisions on what people say a very dicey prospect.
Just ask Walmart. Back in 2008, the uber-retailer asked customers if they would like less clutter in stores. Customers said that they would, but sales plummeted when Walmart de-cluttered the stores. By basing a decision on what people stated that they would do, rather than what they actually did, Walmart lost in estimated 1.85 billion dollars and led to the departure of the executive who led the initiative.
Just a little further back in marketing history is the story of Crystal Pepsi. They tested the idea of Crystal Pepsi in a survey, and it “turned out to be one of the highest scoring [ideas] … of any new product tested to date in the history of the company”. Crystal Pepsi was launched with an expensive sixty-second Super Bowl commercial and promptly flopped. Like Walmart, by asking people what they liked rather than looking at what they did Pepsi ran headlong into a product launch disaster.
It’s because of scientific research and case studies like these that we believe that measuring people’s behavior, rather than asking them what they think, is the best way to validate ideas.
If you want to learn how to validate new business ideas I’d love for you to take a look at my new book — Test & Grow, How to launch a business people will love.
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Originally published at grow.seedling.io on July 18, 2016.
