Why brands shouldn’t listen to consumers if they want to evolve

I don’t think you understand that they have RUINED MY FAVOURITE FOOD

Great piece. One of the first things to remember is what people SAY they’ll do in a research environment and what they actually DO in reality can be very different things. Great examples re carbon offsets on airlines seats, etc… all in favour during research, very few tick the box for the extra $ when booking.

One thing I’d add is that you could be seeing the reaction from a loyal but too-small-to-continue-serving customer base, when your product needs to evolve to suit larger and more profitable markets. I believe that’s the rationale here – you may care (a lot) but there aren’t enough of you to make us focus on you versus the other potential consumers out there.

Wow… “Consumers are terrible at explaining why they do the things they do, and even worse at predicting how they will act in certain situations or to new offers. There are many ways of getting valuable consumer insight – asking them what they think is rarely one of them.”

so you are saying Adam, that the entire Market Research industry is, well, kind of shit?

Do you not agree with the old saying ” give the customer what they want” – that has proven to be successful in many industries on many campaigns.

What’s your alternative to not doing consumer research? Just to tweak the product offering and not tell them and hope it goes okay / nobody notices and complains? Really?

I have two words…isnack 2.0!

I think you may have missed the point there JB. market research is sound but it’s in what questions are asked and how, plus how the information gathered is used.
1. Don’t ask them what they want: that’s asking them to solve the problem you have. Find out instead what they need to achieve and what they value. That way you, the expert, can develop a more elegant solution than the consumer who has no expert knowledge.
2. Don’t ask them how they will act: consumers can’t make predictions. It takes time to learn to use a new product, and customers need to much detail to “imagine” a future requirement. They also presumably have existing products or workarounds they are hesitant to change.
Again, as the expert you should be predicting based on evidence what is needed and how it will be used. In the Steve Jobs scenario he envisaged personal computers in a time when computers where not viable on that scale. His innovations were drawn by looking to the core of the need and the potential of the tools – neither insight comes from the customer.

What DOES come from the customer is information on trending behaviour, demographic diversity, ability, use case scenarios and REQUIREMENTS. Not ever solutions.

Andddd this comment is longer than intended. I enjoyed this piece, short yet insightful – thank you

JB…

I’m not sure Adam was saying the entire MR industry is shit. He was saying there are better ways of understanding consumer behaviour than simply asking consumers to self-reflect. Which could be – I dunno – ethnographic research? My company does brand/product innovation and ethnography is their way in to understanding behaviours every time. It’s really good and there’s quite a lot written about it.

As for “giving the consumer what they want”, yes that’s all well and good, but the subtle point is that often consumers don’t know what they want until they’ve got it (and thus, they can’t begin to articulate it in a traditional research setting). Hence, Google wasn’t invented by consumers in a focus group. Neither was Uber. And if Ford had given people what they’d wanted back in the day…yep it’s that “faster horse” story again.

So Adam, it seems you have a theory that doesn’t always match experimental results. For a theory to be valid, should’t it always match the real world without exception? Given you wrote this article “in light” of the Arnott’s blunder, surely you see that your theory being espoused is more pseudo science than fact (even loss aversion doesn’t hold up in many real world examples).

Jobs is a poor example to use. The product was not at a high level already, he turned an average product into something exceptional rather than taking a loved product and ruining it. False equivalence.

So if you debunk market research, as another commentator has alluded to, what is your alternative? It lovely that you have a opinion, what is your solution?

Then again, as you write, today’s “opinion piece” is tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapper.

P.S. “Heels” not “heals”

A very well written article, Adam. I found it very insightful, especially given some of the Marketing projects I’m currently working on.

Whilst a few other people who have commented have raised good points to argue your reasoning, I still think it has merit. Most consumers don’t know what they want

Remember the episode of the Simpsons where Homer designs a car based on what he, as the average American, wants? This really illustrates the point you’re trying to get across.

Exactly!

Look at the comment above by “OtherAndrew”. I think you’ve missed the article’s point.

While research as a start is incredibly insightful, as you have pointed out, you need to really sift though the data to remove a lot of bias and find the underlying trends. It takes a lot of hard work and investigative technique to take what the customers have said and turn it into actually useful information.

That’s why we employ research professionals with psychology majors like Adam (the writer of this article) to ask the right questions.

EG: Not “what do you want?” but more “Why do you want it?” etc

The difficulty with this specific product transition is that so much brand equity lay in the coloured flakes etc. sitting on the biscuit. It’s not really like a steviol-replacing-some-of-the-sugar type of transition where the consumer might not even detect the change unless prompted.

‘Flavour you can see’ was a superb platform, and tied directly to the experience of eating these; I remember evaluating every biscuit as I brought it out of the box – with the strength of the flavour sensation highly dependent upon how heavily coated in visual cues each individual biscuit was. That almost unique (and massively influential) cross-modality has been lost.

Those flavour flakes were probably the primary reason for the recipe change – assuming Arnott’s reformulated Shapes for a better nutritional content in light of increased media (and potentially legislative) exposure on the subject. What it looks like they have missed, however, is a salient transition platform – ‘now with more flavour’ seems lacking because it appears to be in opposition to the prior brand truth.

Perhaps instead the platform could have been something along the lines of ‘all the flavour is on the inside of the biscuit so you don’t miss out’ – playing upon the loss aversion effect derived from seeing all those precious flavour flakes left at the bottom of the box after all the biscuits have been eaten. This example is a knee-jerk proposition from me, but I’m using it to illustrate my point. As brand communications professionals, we should be delivering a continuous narrative, not a disjunctive one.

This is where I see the value in qualitative sessions with the consumer – not to ask them what to do, but to ascertain how they might respond (especially if it’s negative), and then to build a strategy or contingencies to address this response (though not necessarily to pander to it). I note that Arnott’s have retained some ‘original’ variants in the range, but probably not for the longer term.

I’m guessing the most frequent purchaser (mum) won’t really care about this loss of uniqueness because she doesn’t really eat them herself, and that she will continue to buy them on a habitual basis because the kids (and hubby’s mates) will eat them anyway in the absence of any other option in the cupboard (please excuse the gender assumptions in this snapshot).

I’m also guessing she’ll still buy these whether the proposition is ‘now with more flavour’, ‘flavour on the inside’ or whatever. But for the disaffected (and vocal) loyalists, it might have made a difference – assuming the flavours haven’t actually changed too much (I haven’t tried them). Maybe at product planning stage they could have placed some naturally coloured and constituted elements sitting within the biscuit.

Maybe that’s just too much effort for too little gain and maybe Arnott’s know exactly where the volume purchasing lies. Or maybe in reformulating the biscuit, Arnott’s knew they were never going to match the original flavour profiles, so they just bit the bullet.

But I still think a valuable differentiator has been discarded.

You make a great case for staged and/or discrete transitioning, Adam, but your last two paragraphs seem to say that it doesn’t matter anyway. At a certain threshold this sort of thing might become a New Coke or a new GAP logo: ultimately surmountable issues, but I’d suggest neither company would want a repeat of those events.

spot on elvis.

Well BBQ shapes used to taste like soap. But that approach seems to work for McDonalds doesn’t it ?

Sigh. The modern generation have been bought up with processed garbage and have the taste buds of toddlers.

BTW, shouldn’t the image in there be of Mumbrella ?

At the end of the day everyone can pontificate as much as they like: the reality of this arguement will be in sales and whether mums do indeed by them out of habit. My 13 and 14 year olds – who have had them as an occasional lunchbox extra since starting school say “don’t buy them anymore mum – they taste like crap”. There are three boxes in the pantry I am considering throwing out. Whether they go back to the original formula or come up with something else is now irelevant – we have moved on and found a new product and will not be buying them again. Ah marketing – someone else’s loss is someone else’s gain.

Whether he said it or not, Henry Ford’s famous quote still resonates today…

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Thanks for writing this so I didn’t have to! As market researchers we have a saying ‘you can go broke listening to your customer’. Find out what they want or need, and figure out what you can sell them at a profit.

I agree with this article. Arnotts should rely on their sales data, not consumer feedback. Because, yes, often we don’t know what we want or need. It just so happens that, in this case, Arnotts are going to find that sales of Barbeque Shapes will plummet and there’s their answer. Stick with what sells.

‘Believe nothing you hear consumers say, about half of what you see them do, but believe nearly everything the sales data says they have done’ – P Graves via E A Poe

Traditional market research is kind of shit.

Behavioural research not attitudinal research yields far greater insight

Poor analogy. Henry Ford did not invent the car.

In fact he refused to consider a replacement for the Model T for too long – despite his son’s and his executives’ pleadings, despite what was actually happening in the marketplace with GM building a stable of stratified brands – and by the late 1920s when he finally allowed the Model A he had already lost his dominant market share, never to see it return. Sometimes it pays to listen.

As soon as I started reading this article I was reminded of that episode of the Simpsons too…pretty sure it was his brother’s car company and he sent it broke!

Apologies BN, this was meant to be a reply to Byron Smith above.

Don’t ever underestimate how clever ‘consumers’ are. They made Steve Jobs the person he was. My advice: never, ever stop listening and asking.

BS. The consumers know what they want and the plummet of sales shows it. Not listening to consumers as if they’re brain-dead zombies has cost them money for the new equipment and the advertisement introducing the new shapes and now likely the resurrection of the old shapes unless they decide to stand their ground and go down on the sinking ship because “brands shouldn’t listen if they want to evolve”.

A second dig at the guru seven years later. Well done!

Thank god consumers don’t beg for Palm Oil in their food…

My favourite new feature is the nested comments – makes it easier to lol/troll individual comments.

Otherwise like a few others I kinda prefer the older format, for now. I too miss the Most Commented feature, and the chronological scrolling, and i don’t love the white space and the big ads.

Anyway ho hum tomorrow is a new day, please just keep up the leading content and I will adapt.

The funny thing about that ‘faster horses’ Ford quote is that there is no evidence he actually said it.

Ford did say, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black,” and his inability to recognise that the target audience wanted more purchase options saw his company lose its dominance in the market.

The interesting thing for me is that Arnott’s did its internal testing of the new Shapes and obviously found enough evidence to support the change. But it does run into the issue around if new purchasers will buy the Shapes at the same rate (or higher) as the existing buyers who don’t like the change.

This comment was also to Byron Smith.

It does appear that a reply to a reply ends up at the bottom of the comments list, replying to the wrong person.

Rushdie out. Boom.

As always thanks everyone for contributing to the discussion – I really enjoy reading the responses.

As an after-thought, the problem with ‘sensory testing’ could be not that it’s not accurate, just that people over inflate it’s importance, and its effect size. So people prefer one taste over the other – so what? How big is the effect size, how much does taste contribute to the overall brand choice etc.

It’s a tough situation, and I sincerely feel for the people at Arnott’s.

Adam

PS Just to clarify as well (as many did on my behalf, I’m not saying insights, or market research are not important – it’s just a case of how you do it.

No, he’s just saying that marketing research isn’t very good at predicting the likely success of new products.

Almost every new product gets researched to death prior to launch but the failure rate is still 90%.

I think his point is valid , don’t you?

Spot on, Anthea. And market research has its limitations; it’s never ‘the answer’, only a small part of it. Unfortunately too many marketing staff give it more oxygen than it deserves.