Is the Need for Consumer Insight Dead?

Think about your favorite product. You know, the one you use every day. It might be your iPhone. Your car. Your favorite makeup. Your shoes.

Now, grab a piece of paper. Spend a few minutes and write down everything you can think that would improve the product.

What did you come up with?

Chances are you have a list of minor, incremental upgrades. If you wrote down a list of things you'd improve on the iPhone, you probably listed things like a bigger battery, more storage space, or a better camera.

Those things are all fine and good, but let's face it: anybody could have predicted that. (With the iPhone in particular, that is literally what they have been doing with the past few iterations.)

The truth is, we think we know what we want, but our spotlights are so fixed upon what is in front of us that it is extremely difficult to shine that spotlight on other parts of the stage.

This is super well evidenced throughout history. In the book How Google Works, Jonathan Rosenberg notes how the former internet cable service provider Excite@Home sought insight on what their consumers thought would be most important. The consistent answer was speed. So, Excite@Home pushed forward advertising their product's speed over all else. After being pushed to the market, they found that the most appreciated feature was NOT speed. Rather, consumers appreciated the fact that the service was "always on" because things way back then required the arduous, annoying jaunt known as the dial up process.

That's a pretty obscure example, but there are plenty of things you can probably think of. When the iPad was first introduced, it was laughed off and poked fun at. Now, pretty much everybody owns a tablet or tablet-laptop hybrid, thanks to the path the iPad pioneered.

Or vice versa. Does anybody remember MySpace? MySpace thought to make a name for itself by allowing a grandiose amount of HTML formatting be done to customize a person's profile to reflect his or her personality. But the reality is that the HTML formatting people did to their profiles rendered the performance of the pages to slow down to the point that they were almost unusable. Facebook then came around and stripped away the customizability people thought they wanted and instead opted for a more stable experience.

We all know how that story ended.

Rarely ever does consumer experience insight garner anything truly revolutionary, so it is even worth undertaking anymore?

In my opinion, no.

You know me, and I'm not one to leave you hanging! I do have a different idea. It's not a new idea. It's one that companies like Google and Amazon have adopted and embraced into it's own practices.

Failing fast.

Or, in other words, pushing out the most new products as fast as it can, seeing what sticks, and learning from its mistakes.

Clearly, nobody has the crystal ball to predict what will stick and won't stick. Everybody thought the iPad would be a dud. It wasn't. Everybody thought MySpace was going to last forever. It wasn't. (Which I bet News Corporation wish they would have known when they spent $580 million for it in 2005.) 

Consumers only truly know what they love after they get their hands on it.

Undeniably, there is risk in doing this. But is the opportunity cost of NOT doing something greater than taking the risk?

(Hint: The answer is touched upon in this post.)