Consumer insights are over-rated: Adam Ferrier on the risks of listening to consumers too much
Thinkerbell co-founder Adam Ferrier has said that if consumer insights were used during the creation of Vegemite, the spread wouldn’t even exist, which is why sometimes putting the consumer at the heart of the business isn’t the right choice.
“What you want to put at the heart, at the very core of your business, is your brand and building a brand that consumers then want, understanding what your brand stands for and putting that before anything else,” Ferrier said.
“If we did consumer insights today with Vegemite and did some focus groups and some sensory testing, [I] guarantee you, Vegemite wouldn’t exist. I don’t think Vegemite would pass sensory testing and focus groups today. “
Speaking on a strategy panel at the 2019 Inform News Media Summit, Ferrier said Vegemite’s ‘Tastes Like Australia’ campaign wasn’t created using consumer insights, and that listening too much to feedback can result in the “sacrifice” of the brand.
“The brand gets sacrificed as the consumer insight becomes increasingly important. The Vegemite stuff came from us trying to understand taste and how a whole country could like the taste of Vegemite, so we went to speak to a cultural taste expert at Melbourne University and this person started talking about taste being a cultural construction, and therefore Australians have created the taste of Vegemite and that’s where the tagline came from,” said Ferrier.
Tribal’s new head of strategy Caitlin Lloyd disagreed with Ferrier, saying that she felt the most recent Vegemite work – its battle with Marmite at The Ashes – seemed to be born from a place of consumer insight. She said in her work teaching university students, Vegemite is one of the brands whose work they respond well to.
“[University students] love the campaign because it feels like there is consumer insight behind it, which is why I was so interested when Adam said it’s about building a brand, not necessarily finding that consumer insight,” said Lloyd.
Lloyd’s concern is that too many brands are scared of offending people and are therefore playing it too safe with their advertising. Referencing Marmite’s 2013 ad campaign to ‘End Marmite Neglect’, she said good advertising should make people feel something. She also referenced the controversial ‘Boat People’ Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) campaign, which fellow panellist Mark Green of The Monkeys worked on.
“Both of those campaigns sparked an interest [in the students] that I don’t think I can get from them by showing them many of the other campaigns that are currently live. I think there has been such a fear of upsetting people that we are really operating a lot of the time in the safe middle ground and that doesn’t fit with what people are looking at outside of advertising. I think we’re really guilty in our industry of putting one ad next to another and comparing them and actually that’s not how the consumers view adverts at all. They view it in between looking at pretty extreme content on Twitter, on Facebook. An ad that’s quite nice is not going to cut through,” said Lloyd.
Green said the controversial MLA campaigns wouldn’t be stopping in the near future, and that each one is carefully crafted with “a few easter eggs to set off the left and right-wing militants to generate a bit of conversation on both sides of the fence”.
It isn’t about being brave, said Ferrier, it’s about being informed enough to make decisions that might seem risky to others.
“I think if you’re trying to be brave you’re probably just not as informed as you could be. If you’re informed, then it’s not about being brave, it’s about doing what’s right for your brand,” he said.
Lloyd called out the ‘echo-chambers’ created by a lack of diversity in the industry. This results in campaigns running which someone in the business could easily have pointed out the flaws with. Primarily, she pointed to Pepsi’s infamous Kendall Jenner campaign which sees the model play the role of peace bringer in a protest.
“I think there’s just such an echo-chamber effect and we have become really bad at seeking out discordant views, and that comes from a lack of diversity in our existing companies, and I think we feel to get different ideas which is why things like the Gillette ad happened, the Pepsi ad happened, because you don’t have enough people actually stress testing and saying ‘No this is not going to work, you’ve gone too safe’,” said Lloyd.
“The junior people in those organisations who could have said to you ‘[It] really doesn’t look great to have Kendall Jenner doing this civil rights white saviour thing’, aren’t allowed into those board rooms and aren’t the ones having the conversations.”
The problem with the industry, the panellists agreed, is that consumers don’t care about brands, they care about categories. Advertising that doesn’t cut through the noise won’t encourage a consumer to change their habits, when it wouldn’t actually be that hard to encourage them to change if you could get their attention.
“I don’t think we’re seeing enough [good advertising] in Australia and I think that’s really worrying in a place where Woolies and Coles are going to be eclipsed by Aldi soon, you can’t rely on having been a big brand in the past, you have to act differently,” concluded Lloyd.
topics
Adam Ferrier
Caitlin Lloyd
Inform
Mark green
News Media Works
The Monkeys
Thinkerbell
Tribal DDB
Always seems like a strange debate to me. If a brand is a person’s idea of a product or service, a distinctive bundle of associations in the mind that influence behaviour, then how can brand-builders not be concerned with being insightful about consumers’ minds? Isn’t it just about avoiding being crap. Avoiding thinking the job is as easy as digesting what most consumers say and regurgitating it.
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No offence to Ferrier and the often great work he has done – but I can see this point by looking at his catalogue of work, which often has a focus on brand and attention over insightful strategy. (Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse – just a more media approach than adland approach)
Though of course the irony here is that the understanding of cultural and societal impact on taste IS essentially insight. Just not packaged in the usual adland way.
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I think Adam Ferrier has been lazy on this one. He could have been much more convincing if he truly believes that consumer insights are unnecessary. Vegemite is a 90 year old Australian brand. There are probably several 90 year old brands that if researched today wouldn’t ‘test’ well, but those types of brands aren’t selling taste or other functional attributes – they are selling nostalgia and emotional connection. Flawed argument Adam.
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Ferrier is [Edited under Mumbrella’s comment moderation policy]
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I agree with this article wholeheartedly. However, I think the headline might not be not 100% accurate. I think there is a difference between good consumer insight, and doing what customers tell you to do. Good insight starts at a place of knowing that, as Mr Ogilvy said, “Consumers don’t think how they feel. They don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.” However, this doesn’t mean that watching them is useless. Once we understand that consumers have flawed insight into their own behaviour, research should be designed which aims to understand these irrationalities and flaws.
In this way – the risk isn’t listening to them too much, it’s not thinking about what they say enough.
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Great brands have rarely listened to their customers, because customers rarely know what it is they want until it’s presented to them.
Sony didn’t invent the Walkman because customers asked for it.
They invented it because they thought it was a good idea.
Great brands generally are lead by people who have an intuitive understanding of what they think is great for their brand knowing their customers will most likely to follow them.
This is what leadership is all about.
Great brands – leading brands – don’t put their customers at the centre of their business, they put themselves at the centre.
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Testing an ad, pack or idea isn’t ‘consumer insight’…insight is delivering a clear understanding of a consumer, problem or tension that organisations can solve for. Brand, products, ads are the levers to unlock the opportunity. As an insight professional we don’t ask consumers to create ads or products … we ask them to help us understand if it delivers to a need….in the vegemite example the need is a non-sweet spread I can use on toast in the morning. That insight was used to create vegemite.
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Ferrier’s headline courting statements are over-rated: McGinn on the risks of listening to what Adam says on stage too much
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wikipedia states that, Vegemite was created in 1922, when an Australian food manufacturer asked a chemist to create a product similar to British Marmite. (Is that an insight?)
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Adam is a raconteur and performer.. and he knows HIS brand. And it’s often at the expense of commonsense. He just wants to get a rise out of you. He takes an opposing view just to get a reaction..I worked with him at Naked. He often cares a lot less about his colleagues views and clients’ brands than he does for his own opinion. That’s ok? Right?
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Calm down everyone! We’ve another headlong dash into a (false) binary world view here in the comments. Ferrier is simply saying ‘too much’, not ‘not at all’.
A too-much example: “Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!'” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” – Steve Jobs
A just-right example: P&G Swiffer http://www.continuuminnovation.....s/swiffer/
Both are valid.
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Spot on
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Research can ever be an aid to judgement. The enemy of good strategy, and good advertising, is not research it is people who use it as a substitute for judgement .
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The comments here reveal one of the biggest problems in marketing: imprecise terminology.
The word “insight” clearly means different things to different people, and different things to people in research firms vs ad agencies vs clients, etc.
We’re about the only group of professionals that tolerates (and even encourages) a lack of precision and shared understanding across terms. Surgeons couldn’t. Nor lawyers or accountants.
Does my head in.
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I totally agree. Great example of Mr Ogilvy’s quote is what happened with Marks & Spencer in 2000.
They were facing a slump in sales, so threw a focus group together to see what women wanted in their ads. They wanted to see women in the ads who were like themselves; not stick thin models.
A new ad came out. It had 68% recall soon after it aired, but sales in M&S women’s fashion absolutely tanked. The next year, models were back in their ads.
This case study can be found in Binet & Carters book How Not to Plan.
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I forgot the main kicker. So the real consumer insight in this case study was that women actually wanted to see people they aspired to be – their ‘idealised self’ – in ads. So just to reiterate your point Alex F, its valuable listening to people but I guess we have to think harder about what they really mean/want.
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So if Vegemite tastes like Australia, and I think Vegemite tastes like shit, does that mean Ferrier is saying Australia is shit?
Whose side are YOU on Ferrier?
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This.
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This is the problem in marketing to older people #boomers.
They complain about not seeing themselves in ads, but if you actually show them real reflections of who they are – they don’t relate.
Same thing for weight/health – someone who is too big is ‘not me’, someone who is quite big ‘is just normal’, someone who is slightly big is ‘healthy’. There’s no point at which people identify when they don’t want to – hence why the UK using clay figures was so successful in health marketing!
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What Alex F said.
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Its the same reason Wheels magazine and Top Gear etc show Ferraris, Lambos and Astons. We mightn’t have one, butr we want one… or at worst, aspire to it.
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Spot on
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The lack of distinction between product and brand here is truly concerning, both in the article and comments. A product is real, a brand is not. They require completely different development processes.
Also, let’s stop speaking in absolutes. Some methods work in some contexts, and others do in others. It’s up to the planners to decide what is going to work best, not work to templated thinking.
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Knowledge is overrated, and experience too. And thinking, yeah, total waste of time.
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There is a difference between a quote from a CEO that sounds insightful and reality. Apple run plenty of consumer research and have for a long long time.
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You’ve just figured that out?
It’s been like that since year zero.
And it just doesn’t happen with baby boomers.
It happens with every demographic.
Young models wear clothes targeted at older woman because that’s ‘the dream’ the older woman want to buy.
As Helena Rubenstein used to say:
‘I don’t sell cosmetics, I sell hope’.
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