Don’t Blink

This is a quick piece I wrote for one of my marketing courses, but thought you might enjoy reading it here as well.

Chapter 5, “Kenna’s Dilemma,” in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, is a fantastic bit of insight into market research and the challenges there are in really figuring out what people think—because often they don’t really know what they’re thinking either.

The chapter takes on a number of different case studies where market research has failed to beat the experts and where consumers have simply been wrong about their very own preferences. This is all framed around the story of Kenna, a young musician with a unique sound that the critics loved, but listeners couldn’t quite wrap their heads around. While everyone from Fred Durst to U2’s manager loved his sound, he didn’t test well and suffered because of it. Gladwell puts this in context, comparing his situation to the “Pepsi Challenge,” the development of the Aeron desk chair, and even a couple classic TV shows. These were products that never tested well and no one expected to succeed, but beat the odds because research failed to capture the market’s feelings accurately, or because companies failed to interpret that research correctly.

There is one line in the chapter that I think really sums up the lesson to be learned most succinctly: “The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.”

Without a doubt, this is the most important and interesting insight to take away from this chapter for marketers, and for anyone who wants to understand how revolutionary products often succeed. Whether it’s the disaster that was New Coke, jam tasting, or Kenna getting screwed over by the record companies, market research is by no means an exact science, despite its appearances.

I think one of the most fascinating applications of market research today is with regard to social media. Take Facebook, for example. If research is to be believed, everyone hates Facebook. According to all the polls and surveys, its brand value is practically worthless, privacy concerns outweigh all its benefits, and users are threatening to quit in droves. The user interface isn’t as smooth as it could be, the privacy controls are too confusing, they’re selling private information… the list goes on and on of complaints people have about Facebook.

But this isn’t a new phenomenon—people have been complaining about every single thing Facebook has ever done to improve its service, all the way back to the advent of the newsfeed, which is now one of the most iconic features of social media as we know it today, and instrumental to the development of entire industries of new products, services and marketing. And Facebook’s user population is still growing tremendously. Only recently they passed up 500 million users, making them far and away the largest social network in the world, ever, and their growth and revenue shows no signs of slowing down. But if market research says they’re in such trouble, why are they so successful?

It’s because they haven’t listened to their customers. They recognized that every single change they make is going to be looked at unfavorably, because everything in the social media world is “merely different” for the average user. As I quoted above, market research, polls, etc. can’t detect the distinction between bad and different, and everything in social media is different—in fact, revolutionary. So we’ve got a cycle: people hate it because it’s different and they don’t understand it, and they’re wrong. Facebook goes ahead and does what they want anyway, because they recognize that consumers don’t understand their own behavior—not to insult their (our) intelligence, but it’s simply true—and then the feature gets gradually accepted and molded into part of the social media standard that we all know and love today. Facebook reaps the rewards and continues on its way to becoming one of the most important and successful companies of our generation.

As Gladwell points out, this isn’t new. Market research isn’t a secret weapon now, nor has it ever been. There have always been products, services, and people who tested poorly but went on to succeed, and consumers who misunderstood their own interpretation of different and revolutionary products. Is market research still important? Of course, and I don’t think Gladwell means to suggest that it isn’t. But it also should never be relied upon solely and without context, and that’s a lesson we can all learn from.

Consumer behavior is unpredictable and hard. It’s never the same and consumers can react one way to one industry and just the opposite in another. Tastes and culture change, personal beliefs and lifestyles change (such as the rapidly evolving attitude towards privacy in the U.S.), and especially in the past two decades, technology changes. Market research plays a key role in understanding how to market products in every industry and to every kind of customer, but it’s certainly not infallible.