Do the best ideas for new products come from customers, or in spite of them?
That intriguing question was at the heart of the panel discussion, "Ignore Your Customers, They Don't Know What They Want," at the 2005 Harvard Business School Marketing Conference on April 9. Anita Elberse, marketing professor at HBS, was the moderator.
Elberse started the discussion off with a question: "Should [marketers] ignore their customers, or do customers have something to offer?"
At BMW, an engineering-focused company with seven-year product cycles, risk taking is part of the culture, said Patrick McKenna, manager of marketing communications at the luxury carmaker. And sometimes that risk involves creating products based more on intuition than on deep analysis of customer needs.
Examples of those risks include the creation of BMW Films and the popular MINI Cooper. BMW Films is a series of short action features with name actors and directors and, of course, BMW cars. McKenna explained that the concept, which was developed by three key managers at the carmaker, was never tested externally. But the films nevertheless have become very valuable marketing tools.
Research is useful but how you interpret it is important. |
Wendy Cockayne Lucas, Avon |
With the MINI, BMW bucked a number of industry trends. "Sometimes it comes down to the marketers' intuition to say that it will succeed," McKenna said.
On the one hand you might have consumer research telling you that cup-holders are important. On the other, your company's engineers, whose focus is to build the best car, think it is absolutely verboten to have cup-holders, he said. "It takes marketing to make changes like that."
Sharing that view was Patrick Casey, a director at Product Genesis, which provides strategic innovation services. "One thing you don't want to do in the way of market research is to ask people what you should make for them," he said.
What his group has found is that consumers often can't communicate their needs effectively, and it takes field research to come to a better understanding of what the needs really are. When Product Genesis was involved in early research on digital photography, a team was dispatched to one-hour photo-processing centers to watch people waiting impatiently to get their film developed. These field observations are helpful, Casey said, because they "look for inconsistencies in consumer behavior."
Wendy Cockayne Lucas (HBS MBA '98), global marketing director for color cosmetics at Avon, said that "research is useful but how you interpret it is important."
Lucas gave an example of how Avon misinterpreted the research on its popular Skin So Soft line. About five years ago, Avon decided to restage this line by changing the packaging but not the formula. In the end, she said, customers were confused about what was actually in the bottle, and sales dropped instantly. Execution was the key. "It could have been carefully executed to say, 'same great product, just a new look,'" Lucas said.
In another example, Lucas explained how Avon successfully launched their Anew Clinical product by taking risks and moving ahead of consumer trends. "You do the research, you interpret it, but you really have to go with what is the right thing for you," she said.
Bob Berney, president of Newmarket Films, discussed how the independent film market differs from Hollywood in terms of market research. Newmarket does little traditional focus group research, he said, taking instead an "organic" approach. "We like to start small and grow... [it's] sort of undefinable in a way."
Indie films are all about giving the movie-going public something that they aren't used to getting or something that they may not even know they miss. "[It's] something they want to discover on their own," he said.
Take for example My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Berney said the film, which was acquired by Newmarket, was perceived by many in Hollywood as not capable of reaching a mainstream audience. Newmarket tested it with audiences through word-of-mouth screenings and bought it after favorable reaction, but also on a gut feeling that the picture would have wide interest.
Lessons learned
"So what seems to be a lesson learned from all of these panelists is that asking customers what they want doesn't seem to be useful for radical innovation, but perhaps it is somewhat useful for incremental innovation," Elberse said.
Bob Berney said the lesson for Newmarket is to trust your instinct. "Newmarket is a small companyit can take risksbut it all comes down to gut instinct," he said. In the case of the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ, for example, Berney said it was more or less a gut feeling rather than any rational analysis that drove the decision to jump on the film.
BMW's Patrick McKenna said you need the courage of your convictions and you need a good understanding of your brand. His advice: "Get out there and talkwalk in the shoes of the customer."