What Numbers cannot tell you about customers

From Harvard Blog (Lara Lee and Daniel Sobol)

Companies are using the vast amounts of user-generated data to guide innovation of new products and services but data mining does not equate to developing "customer intelligence."

While numbers can possibly tell you who the customers are what they do, it may not tell you why because human behavior is nuanced and complex. Desire and motivation are influenced by psychological, social, and cultural factors that require context and conversation in order to decode.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz  says all our behaviors are imbued with socio-cultural significance and interpreting meaning and motivation requires a solid understanding that comes from detailed observation of people's interactions and their environment. Numbers will observe that there was an “eye movement” but they will never tell you whether it was a wink or a twitch. It is very important to know .

A client engaged us to design new products for base of the pyramid (BOP) families in urban Brazil. We set out to understand the needs, values, and motivating desires of the people for whom we were designing. We observed virtually every family owned a television. But when we dug deeper, we learned that the TVs were not status symbols or signs of increasing wealth; they were safeguards. Because of the violence prevalent in the favelas where these families lived, parents feared their children going out at night. What these parents really wanted was a way to make the living room more entertaining than the streets. Building on this insight, we positioned the product as an engaging experience designed for kids. The client regained market leadership.

When the Data Trail Goes Cold
Today the trends can be identified more quickly and precisely than ever before but the fact remains that any trend, however early it's identified or robustly defined, can't tell you how to succeed. For this you need to conduct in-depth interviews and in-home ethnography to better understand the psychology, unmet needs, and underlying values. Such insight allows you to not only design just a product but an entire experience comprising utility, accessibility, aesthetics, information, and emotional resonance.

To innovate for a future in which consumers' desires and habits change as quickly as their mobile devices, businesses must be nimble in delivering emotional connections beyond just functional utility. That requires understanding customers as people — nuanced, dynamic, unpredictable — not just collections of data.