Predictions
It’s certainly entertaining to watch the press do backflips to explain how they could have been just so wrong about the New Hampshire primaries. Did they ask the wrong people? Apply the wrong statistical model? Misread what the public really wants? Or did they run into what every marketing manager knows, or should know: that asking people what they are going to do is not a good predictor of what they’ll actually do.
Predicting consumer behavior is, unfortunately, the (unacknowledged) point of most product design-and-marketing efforts. The very existence of a plan to produce a product predicts that someone will want to buy it. The definition of the features, the manufacturing strategy, the conversation with the buyer at Target, are all about prediction. But prediction of this sort isn’t possible – what consumers say they want, and how much they’ll pay for it, doesn’t really map to what they do. Prediction implies linear behavior and assumes complete knowledge of the environment, neither of which are available when it comes to voters or consumers. As a result, my clients often have little confidence that they really know what consumers will respond to. As a result, many of them go for volume – if we cover the shelves at big-box retailers with enough product, that will increase the chance that the consumer will hit one when he throws his apparently-random purchasing dart. Sad, but that seems to be the thought process.
When the business press talks about “design thinking,” what they’re really talking about is doing away with the equivalent of primary-race-pollsterism as a method for design, and replacing it with empathy. Instead of guessing what a consumer will want, become the consumer and see the world through his eyes. All of the ethnographic research we do, all the frameworks and structure we develop, is about understanding how the consumer thinks, not what they want. Once you know how a consumer sees the world, the “right” answer to a problem is easier to find – many times, it pops out as the obvious answer.
It’s too bad politicians are incapable of understanding how the people they strive to govern see the world – if they did, there would be no need to “test the waters” or “float a trial balloons.” If you want to give me what I want, whether it’s a toaster or governance, you must know me.
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