Feedback. Not what it’s cracked up to be
In this guest post, Peter Miller warns of the dangers of listening to consumer feedback.
I’m not sure whether or not it’s fashionable to undertake 360 degree reviews any more but here at Adstream we persist. I have long been of the view that it’s the only feedback I can trust, though not the only feedback I can use.
Anything I find unthinkable and insulting I dismiss as a statistical error or vileness, thus rising above it. Any finding that rewards I consider commonsense and a credit to my hiring skills.
I dismiss the poor scores from my direct reports on the basis that they are paid a lot and don’t deserve happiness as well. It helps if you can consistently wander around in a blind haze of self deception.
Speaking of which, I want to acknowledge the Communications Council for putting on Circus – The festival of commercial creativity. Being a cheapskate I paid for a colleague and I to attend the keynote day only. It was terrific value as we enjoyed a terrific day of random creative ideas, experiences, insights and opinion.
The end of each presentation was given over to questions.
Almost without exception not a single question rose from the 800 newly illuminated, which I thought odd until I realised I was one of the silent absolute majority.
Jeff Julian of Hollywood fame was an exception. He was peppered with questions about the movies and movie stars which had nought to do with anything.
I wondered at this and concluded everyone must have been busting to go to the dunny, evidenced by the surge in that general direction. In my case I was still figuring out what they meant four hours later. In the case of Faris Yakob this ran for days and I still have the same question: What was that again?
Nick Law was as usual, beguilingly brilliant. From what I can tell every marketing challenge can be answered by some weird off topic scientific invention. In the case of Nike, hundreds of thousands of keen runners now find themselves with an electronic bracelet they can’t get off. Nike now knows when their runners are buggered even if the owner doesn’t.
My out take is that consumer marketing is now completely addicted to consumer feedback which used to be called consumer insight which used to be called market research.
Now we all know that customer feedback is so crucial. But what feedback can you rely on? So many advertising campaigns start with powerful offline creative executions are designed to create a rolling maul in the Twittersphere.
Yet it occurs to me that the involvement of consumers in these kinds of campaigns is not random and can’t be considered statistically reliable.
In some ways it is a bit like talk back radio. If an opinionated reactionary bangs on constantly about terrible the blight of boat people despoiling our northern beaches, guess who gets involved? Basically, Tradies with bad haircuts and very limited horizons jam the lines in agreement.
You wind up with a volume of extreme opinionation from the admittedly highly involved and a jock who assumes everyone agrees with him.
In marketing, we need to carry the majority, not only the feverishly engaged.
If we base our nightly media and marketing decisions based only on what the highly involved and engaged are saying and doing across the social media networks, we run the risk of missing what the silent majority is thinking.
There are some old fashioned remedies to this, and they don’t all involve social media. They involve reliable qualitative and statistically robust quantitative research.
And they also involve potent consumer campaigns that drive consumers to simple conclusions like I gotta get me one of them!
Peter Miller is MD of Adstream Australia
Peter! are you suggesting that the answer to this is ……(Gulp) Hard Work?
How passée can you get? we want instant answers to vague questions these days, not hard won honest answers to concise and focused ones. But since you insist, I can tell you that your talk back radio analogy is flawed. First (and be ashamed) why Tradies? anyone with a limited horizon might well respond in the same way, and how do you know what their hair cuts look like? radio has no image outside the one in your “mind’s eye” composed of pixels from your own mental codices, and reflecting endemic opinion and prejudice. On talk back, the Jock always has the ultimate power; infinitely more talk power via the Silver Neumann and the transmitter, than any poor bugger being monitored via a phone line in. Ultimate power to cut the caller off entirely, and, usually a combined rating scale, and producer, who will guide the tenor and propriety. This slight admonishment aside, I agree with you all the way.
I also have a very strong leaning to the belief that we shout too loudly and aim way above the target most of the time where marketing and advertising are concerned.
Pears soap does the trick nicely, a product shot and a rosy cheeked child with a very clean face and knees, brand name in the top billing spot and never a word spoken. Hang and illuminate the prints from days of yore, cast them on screens, post them on the net, they shout out without making the slightest sound. I remember award winning TV commercials from yesteryear, shot in brilliant 35mm, that failed to lift the market or sell one more unit than the pre campaign average. Masters and Johnson thought they had a breakthrough, and in some ways they did, but it took years to discover that many men had lied to inflate their egos and many women had lied to either cover their personal embarrassment, or boost their perceived inadequacies.
I voiced a soap commercial once that failed in trials on account of having a male voice where a female voice would be less offensive, given that the visual component depicted a naked woman (how else do you bathe?) using the product.
It turned out that the majority of the audience on a night of poor attendance was a lesbian feminist group. Hey I got paid anyway, and I don’t give a rats either way, but this was hardly an accurate view of the soap buying public.
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Henry Ford once said “if I asked consumers for feedback on what they wanted they would have told me a faster horse”.
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More topically, my favourite Steve Jobs quote:
“It’s not the consumer’s job to know what they want”
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god it really shits me when people quote Henry Ford and Steve Jobs as justifications for dismissing market research, launching ‘build it and they will come’ products, or just arrogantly justifying the primacy of their own ideas and views
the ratio of genius-led, innovative products which succeeded despite involving no consumer feedback to those which have flopped because they failed to do so would be about 1:1000
to all the creatives out there who take mortal offense at the views of the great unwashed: pretend for a moment that the millions of bucks about to be invested were your own, then tell us again how disinterested you are in basic due diligence
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Great article Peter. As you say there is a pretty big self-selection bias in online feedback.
Presumably however if you question the value of online feedback you have to question the value of some measures of online ‘engagement’ as they are effectively the same thing i.e. do comments on a social media campaign mean a brands customers were engaged or that the loud minority were engaged.
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Miller,
You are right. I would add that some feedback can be malicious or designed to skew results.
The recent revelation about Chrissie Swan’s nominations for the Logies show how easy this has become.
It is correct that products can be a success despite failing in research, as the Sony Walkman did.
In the majority of cases it is the well researched ideas that win.
James
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very happy to discuss it with you mate – drop me a line 😉 FX
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Or possible deliberate obsfuscation by dissenting commenters?
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Deliberate obfuscation? Is there any other kind?
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Couldn’t agree more Peter. There has and always will be a significant difference between asking people what they do/intend to do and observing what they actually do. You’ve got to have the ability to do the latter in a highly granular way in order to be able to fully understand action – the very thing most marketing monies are invested to impact.
Happy Easter
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I like the thought of a self amplifying feedback loop of idiots…
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