Astonishing gains in technology have placed at our fingertips more information about consumers than anyone had ever hoped for. Yet despite the wealth of information, there is a poverty of customer understanding judging by the rising tide of product and marketing campaign failures.
At a workshop on the New Customer Majority that I recently conducted for a Midwestern bank, I asked its marketing director, "How long have you been marketing director."
"About 12 years," he said.
I then asked, "With all the high-tech information systems at our disposal, do you think you have a better handle on customers today than when you first became marketing director?"
"No," he crisply replied, adding, "They are not acting like they used to and we don’t really know why."
Can anyone who is aware of marketing’s declining productivity during a time when the amount of customer information has never been greater conclude anything other than marketers don’t understand customers now as well as they used to? It’s easy to blame external factors such as weather, war jitters, weak economy, and so on, but marketing clients want solutions not excuses. Marketing is broken and needs fixing.
Kevin Clancy and Robert Shulman saw marketing’s problems coming over a decade ago. They announced on the first page of their 1991 trailblazer The Marketing Revolution, "The marketing revolution is coming because failure is self-evident and everybody—stockholders, directors, CEOs, customers, the government—is angry because marketing, which should be driving business . . . doesn’t work."
Clancy and Shulman, the former chairman and CEO, respectively, of Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, went after consumer research in their no-holds-barred assault on marketing. They are hardly alone in criticizing their own field. A seasoned researcher at a global brand company recently told me, "The old ways of research are fraying. Poor guidance from research is costing companies bundles. We need new ways of looking at consumers because they’ve changed."
The head of consumer research for one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies (who asked not to be named) called me after reading an article I had written for American Demographics that drew the largest reader response in the magazine’s history. The article described how contemporary brain research explains much about why consumers often mislead companies. "Even so," he said, "Something is wrong because results are getting less dependable even though we’re doing research the way we’ve always done it."
I offered him the following thoughts:
Traditional research has become less dependable because methodologies are based on experiences in a marketplace dominated by younger minds. Traditional consumer research lacks sensitivity to the different mental processing styles of the older people who now form the adult majority. It is structured around how minds operate in the "much coveted 18-to-34 demo." The younger mind is more linear, literal, and categorical. This makes it easier to render what they say into statistical statements. Also, younger minds are less sensitive to context when inferring the meaning of things because their thinking style is more absolutist. Things either are or are not. There are few grays, few in-betweens, because perceptions are more sharply defined—more broadly etched in unambiguous black and white. Thus, what they tell researchers is more clear-cut, less context-sensitive, and less conditional than what older people may tell researchers. So, the gaps between truth and error are narrower between young research subjects than between older subjects.
Older subjects’ mental processes tend to be less absolutist and their perceptions tend to be more subjective. They generally feel less compelled to align what they think with what others think. An older person’s greater sensitivity to contextual influences when inferring meanings of things can yield research testimony laced with ambiguity and murky results. The older person often wants to answer a question with "it depends" but is frustrated by research instruments that prevent him or her from doing so. The result? Subjects mislead researchers by doing the only thing they can do in response to black-and-white questions: They provide black-and-white answers that distort reality. This is not arcane theory. A large body of research literature describes how mental processing styles evolve from a more objective, absolutist bent in adolescence and early adulthood to a more subjective, conditional bent in the second half of life, where most adults are today. By the time a person nears the half-century mark, this developmental change in mental processing only can increase the tentativeness of research results if it is not taken into account in designing the research.
"Of course!" the pharmaceutical consumer researcher said, almost shouting over the phone. "I should have known! I also do research on physician markets. I’ve seen what you just described. When I interview young doctors I often know what their answers will be before I ask a question, but it’s harder for me to predict how the older guy will answer the same question."