Henry Ford famously said “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
This observation is lost on many marketers today.
People don’t know what they want. Yet companies like Vodafone, Yahoo and T-Mobile have repositioned themselves and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on being whatever you want them to be.
A Branding Strategy Insider article titled, “The Danger of You Centered Branding” has this to say:
Vodafone is spending millions declaring ‘Power to you’. Yahoo! is proclaiming: ‘There is a new master of the digital universe. You’.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile is launching its myTouch smart-phone by asking consumers to imagine a ‘one-of-a-kind phone for your one-of-a-kind life’.
‘We are about you,’ say these brands. ‘Whatever you want, that’s what we are.’ It’s very ‘co-creative’, ‘empowering’ and all the other things 22-year-old marketers crap on about.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to work, because when you don’t stand for anything, you get eaten alive by competitors who do.
How very true.
Successful companies like Apple continue to create products that people didn’t know they wanted until they were invented. They are empowering their own brand, not some nebulous idea about who the customer is and wants.
They know their success is founded on the substance of their products.
In a TED talks video, Malcolm Gladwell describes how Campbell’s Prego spaghetti sauce overtook the dominate brand, Ragu, by giving people something they didn’t know they wanted. And in so doing, changed the entire food industry.
Success or failure starts with the product, not the marketing and advertising campaign.
Normally I'd add a thought or two of my own but I couldn't have put it any better. TED video included and everything.
Actually, I do have a thought or two:
My specific comment on why market research does little do determine what people want (aside from this list of how capturing conscious-level thoughts on 'want' can be problematic) is this: market research is typically done far far far out of context.
The quintessential example is the soda taste-test. Giving someone a small sample of Pepsi/Coke and then determining that people like Pepsi better based on the results in no way captures how people actually drink the two. Many people find the sweetness of Pepsi better in small quantities, but overwhelming in 20oz form. Focus groups are infinitely worse when it comes to 'want' in context.
More on rational research next post.
