How to Fix Everything in Marketing, Instantly
Back in the fall of 2011, Japanese software developer Isseki Nagae wrote a blog post titled: "Why Japanese Manufacturers Keep Losing to Apple."
Technology companies like Sony (argued Nagae) kept basing their new product development on customer input, whereas Steve Jobs was using customer input to scrub the mildew off his diamond-studded toilet seat.
Jobs once famously said, “It's not the customer's job to know what they want."
Bold words, with a significant impact on technology creators. But an even greater significance -- potentially -- for marketers.
I'm calling this Jonathan's Second Law of Marketing: Stop asking people to think.
Okay, so how does this work, you ask.
Let's say I'm launching a marketing survey targeting C-level insurance executives. Here's a bad question to ask:
"Which social marketing channels do you consider most important for marketers targeting C-level insurance executives?"
The response you'll get is a mixture of what your survey targets think, what they think they think, and what they think they think should be the right answer.
Here's a better but still flawed question to ask:
"Which social media channels have you used in the past 48 hours for business purposes?"
You're close: keeping it strictly behavioral is the right play. But by adding “for business purposes,” you've inadvertently made the survey targets think -- what constitutes a business purpose? I was looking at Facebook at work... is that business?
See, as soon as people start thinking, they start misinterpreting, assuming, rationalizing behavior, and introducing a whole host of biases that kill your critical analysis.
This is why focus group testing doesn't work and A-B testing does:
We don't understand ourselves. Our minds are emotional, irrational, inconsistent little mysteries. It's cliche but true: We don't know what we want until we see it, and we don't know what we have until we lose it.
Anyone who says otherwise is selling something – and probably not very successfully.