Storytelling, Gurus, and Processes

I had the pleasure of reading three articles (Gladwell, Zaltman, Ulwick) that address the search for meaningful understanding of what people want. Each offers a critique (in their own way) of how direct research of customer preferences is insufficient. Malcom Gladwell (as always) teaches through masterful storytelling examples. Zaltman is a talking-head academic guru selling trademarked vapor proprietary research methods, a book, and is probably on the public speaking circuit. I immediately do not trust this guy. Ulwick offers a direct, simple, useful, applicable method - I would probably like this guy in person.

Gladwell has an outstanding written voice that explains complex ideas in the form of stories. In this chapter he exposed the conflict that often occurs between instinct (spontaneous and often accurate decision making) and quantitative research. He wove a tale of a musician that by experts opinion should be successful with consumers and by industry standard data-driven investigation should not be successful. I suspect that the typical readers are driven to feel sympathy for the artist and outrage that he never got his chance in the spotlight. I feel differently. I think Gladwell pulled an “Outlier” story to prop up the idea that instinct can dominate detailed investigation. Gladwell explicitly suggests that the music industry is less sophisticated than CPG firms in their research methods. I disagree. Music companies cannot spend vast sums of money researching single artists the same way a CPG company can for a new product idea because of the revenue at stake, the lifespan of the average artist’s successful career, and cost of more sophisticated research. If the industry has a test that can predict with 85% certainty whether a song will be a hit, they would at least rival the success rate of CPG firm product launches.

Zaltman has a “shotgun” approach. He applies elements of many disciplines into one comprehensive test. It emphasizes images selected by a survey participant and interviews to determine a form of mental map of how people thing about an organization or issue. I do not doubt that his qualifications are substantial (Harvard) or that his methods sound impressive on the surface. But the idea of condensing 20 images per participant and a host of qualitative answers in an interview format down into meaning insights sounds remote. The mental map created for PG&E appear fruity and blue sky to me. You could construct a similar map that would make similar sense in many different ways. It has all the features of Tarot card drawings and horoscopes in that people can see elements of truth in many configurations. Again, I don’t doubt that the questions he asks could be meaningful ones – I doubt the integration of these tests has any repeatable statistical significance. It appears to me a complex methodology designed to sell a lot of billable hours that can be carefully hidden off stage behind the curtains from an unsuspecting client.

Ulwick offers an approach that on-face makes a lot of sense to me. They are proposing a “begin with the end in mind” method, whereby research is directed at the *end-goals* of consumers rather than the *means* (product attributes) that get there. The outcome of this approach is essentially a spec-sheet set of constraints for engineers and designers (They love this) that gives them maximum flexibility in figuring creative ways of obtaining these goals. Most engineers will tell you that with a set of specs (and unlimited time/money) they can do just about anything. This approach has a particular weakness however: Most firms have specific resources/capabilities. A company that specializes in, say, yogurt cannot product crackers. So asking consumers for their end-product needs might lead to some unproductive research about product ideas they have no competitive advantage in solving.

So in a Blink: Gladwell makes me suspicious – he’s writing a book about spontaneous genius after all – so its straightforward that he would want to go after quantitative research that overrules expert-spontaneous opinion. Zaltman appears to be incorporating too many things at once to achieve meaningful conclusions. Ulwick offers a research method I immediately like, but I can see situations where it might not make as much sense where firms have narrow product constraints.