An excerpt from Insights on the Brink: Revitalizing the Market Research and Analytics Industry by Brett Townsend and Tim Hoskins
If you look at any great story, there are elements they all have: a main character, a want or need, a plot, tools the character uses, and most importantly, conflict. Conflict is the engine that drives every story, and the best storytellers not only have compelling conflict but highlight the conflict. The conflict can be internal or external, but it’s the most important element in every story. From Darth Vader to Spectre to Voldemort to the Joker to Loki, every great story has that agent of conflict. The key for any brand is twofold:
- Understand the brand is a tool the hero/heroine uses to overcome the conflict. The brand is never the hero.
- Find the one conflict your target consumer faces, and show how your brand helps them overcome it.
It would be very boring if T’Challa and Erik Killmonger became instant friends, if Jack Bauer didn’t have any terrorists or government corruption to fight, or if John McClane had a great marriage and attended a quiet Christmas party with his wife. Conflict is seen as disorder by the brain that craves order, which is why we always want to see conflicts resolved. It also explains why the last image of the movie Inception drove so many people crazy—it left our brains unresolved as to whether the top kept spinning or started to wobble.
If we do not identify the target consumer’s key conflict, we do not have a compelling story, nor can we position our brand/product as the solution to or tool with which to fight the conflict. Any presentation we deliver should highlight the consumer conflict and how we intend to help them.
Which leads us to consumer empathy. Having empathy toward others is not just an important corporate concept; it’s a human concept. The major religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and others reference the need for empathy toward others. It’s also not a modern-day concept. Adam Smith in his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments said that we must place ourselves in the situations of others “and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”
Of the many attributes of a great CI professional, empathy is toward the top of the list. The ability to feel our consumers’ conflict and be motivated to find ways to help them is a key to our jobs. Therefore, the first lesson we must learn is that there is no empathy in data. No one in your company can “become in some measure the same person with” the consumer through charts, graphs, tables, and advanced analytical methods. And we can’t create empathy in our organizations by talking about the generic “consumer,” listing their demographics, or even telling general stories about the collective consumer. We need to make it personal on an individual level. We can’t generate empathy about hunger in Africa by giving statistics about malnutrition and deaths, but we can by talking about an individual mother’s daily dilemma of whether she or her young son gets to eat. About how Julie is a working, single mom, who is so distressed she doesn’t have time to cook nutritious food for her daughter. Or about the working- class Johnson family who must decide whether to pay the electric bill or buy food that month. That is the type of empathy that drives real solutions and actions.
Empathy Leads to Sales
Acquiring consumer empathy requires us to understand the real part of consumers’ lives. Jim Stengel, former CMO of Procter & Gamble, has the famous quote: “If you want to know how a lion hunts, don’t go to the zoo, go to the jungle.” “Going to the zoo” could be classified as conducting focus groups, doing “desk research,” fielding yet another quantitative survey, or even relying on AI to analyze results and do research for you. None of these ways provide an avenue to empathy because you don’t spend time with consumers, see their frustrations, understand their challenges, hear their struggles, and develop empathy for them that translates to great insights. British author John le Carre captured this with his observation that “a desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.” But getting out from behind the desk doesn’t always require large budgets and travel; just go fish where the fish are. While with PepsiCo, Brett would frequently go to the grocery store, push a cart around, and observe the behavior and listen to the shopper conversations in the different aisles.
Online quantitative surveys and new DIY tools are great, but they’re no substitute for spending time with consumers to understand their desires and behavior. The COVID-19 pandemic has hurt our industry in the sense that many feel it’s no longer necessary to travel or spend time with consumers to get meaningful insights. Travel budgets have been slashed, demands for one to two-week turnarounds hinders quality consumer interaction, and the general feeling is that DIY tools enable insights to be done from a cubicle.
It’s a simple, hierarchical progression: if we have consumer empathy, we understand consumer needs, desires, and behavior; if we understand their behavior, we can create products, services, messages, and ads that make it easier for them to purchase our brand or products to solve their problems. If we teach our organizations to have consumer empathy, the product developers can develop relevant solutions, the marketers can craft the story to tell in ads, and we can shift the focus of the highly compensated senior executives who have a constant eye on the balance sheet instead of the consumer. Without consumer empathy driving an organization, there will be no long-term success.
When you have consumer empathy, you better understand consumer behavior, which leads to making money. Will Leach, founder of Mindstates Research and author of Marketing to Mindstates, says it very simply: all CI professionals should be “behavioral change agents.” If we can be the catalyst for consumer behavioral change, we can be a significant profit center for our companies and clients for that’s what determines financial success.
At the end of the day, we can’t just focus on data points. We need to remember there are people behind those data points, and we need to ensure that we are effectively telling our stories through the lens of their stories.
Brett Townsend is SVP of Strategy at Quester Strategy and Insights and has had a successful career of generating sizable revenue on both the corporate and agency sides of consumer insights.
As President of Quester, Tim Hoskins leads a team of award-winning strategists, researchers and developers who leverage consumer narratives as the foundation for developing bold-breakthrough strategies. Under his guidance, Quester has been instrumental in the development of behavior changing advertising campaigns, new product innovations and growth strategies that drive significant business impact for their clients.
They are the co-authors of Insights on the Brink: Revitalizing the Market Research and Analytics Industry. For more information, please visit, www.Quester.com.