You know what you want don’t you. You know what you like. It’s like the old saying about art, “I don’t know much, but I know what I like” (usually followed by something resembling, but not convincingly matching, a laugh).

And so it is that, often, organisations will turn to consumers to find out what they want. It seems a sensible enough thing to do after all, what sort of person doesn’t know what he wants? Let’s do some market research!

Except that, what we think we want and what we ultimately end up choosing to do are completely different things. There are a number of reasons for this:

Most of our behaviour is unconsciously triggered.  We react to our environment in a way that we have learned is best (safest) for us.  But with no link to the way in which our unconscious mind works, we are not aware of the processes involved in directing our behaviour.

• When we think to the future we can never do so with a total view.  So when we are asked to think about one aspect of our future, such as whether or not we would like a particular product or service, we react to it in a totally artificial context.  We are not thinking about the stresses and strains that will be going on at the time, the fact that we might be having a bad day, that we’re in a hurry, or that we really can’t afford to something to go wrong with what we’re buying because of the specific application we have in mind.
• There’s no personal risk or opportunity cost involved in answering a question about something. But when it comes down to it, choosing to buy something normally involves some element of not buying something else.  At the very least it involves financial outlay and the risk that we will end up feeling the money was wasted.
• People can’t envisage what all the consequences of something they want will be.  Being able to blend fruit into a delicious smoothie seems like a fantastic thing. But when it comes down to it, having to get the heavy machine out of the cupboard each time to use it, and taking it apart to clean it, are a major chore.
• People tend to focus on the positive.  So when something is presented to them they will work on the basis that what they are hearing is true (and in product development at that stage often there is nothing else to go on; people will assume things will be as they are intended to be).  However, the first time they hear that something has gone wrong for somebody else they will be reluctant to take a chance themselves.

It always amuses me when so-called consumer research comes back to tell us that people would like their lives to be different in some fundamental way. They’d like us to have a more “natural lifestyle”, they wish we weren’t so dependent on big brands, or they resent global businesses.

This is a bit like a squirrel saying he resents having to go up trees to collect nuts and would rather they were just available on the ground because, if he’s really honest, that whole leaping about in the trees business is scary not fun.

Mr Squirrel has overlooked a number of important things when replying to the survey about nut distribution:

He’s in the habit of running up trees to fetch his nuts; even if they were placed on the ground he would probably head up the tree as a matter of course anyway.

• He’s a somewhat jumpy character, quite nervous of larger creatures around him.  As a result he would find the prospect of all the nuts being on the ground extraordinarily stressful; he’s actually happier than he thinks up in the trees where ground dwelling predators can’t get to him.
• With the nuts available on the ground more creatures can get to them.  Now everyone is looking to get nuts on the ground and he’s going to have to bury his quite a lot deeper so they aren’t discovered by everybody else.  He hadn’t realised he didn’t like digging quite this much.
• Mrs Squirrel has told him that the nuts she collected from the ground haven’t kept as well over the winter.  On balance, it seems worth the trouble of getting the fresh ones from higher up in the trees.

Okay, so I’ve used a fairly silly example to make my point, and I’m no expert on squirrels so I apologise for any factual errors in the squirrel (or nut) department.

But the issues are exactly the same when it comes to asking consumers what they want. People are so bad at predicting how they will behave in the future that the chances of getting accurate information when asking them what they want are effectively zero.

Inevitably sometimes what research says they want will be borne out.  But it’s worth remembering that that is only an argument for the validity of the research process if it is true every time.

When it comes down to it there are few alternatives to getting the product in front of people and seeing how they react.  And even then it is easy to misread their reaction or to inadvertently trigger an inaccurate response if you aren’t aware of all the ways in which consumer behaviour can be influenced indirectly.

Image courtesy: Craig Elliot