Wind Tunnel Marketing, The Sequel: On the Need for Divergent Insight
21st May 10
Posted in Brands, creativity
Post by Charles Wigley, Chairman, BBH Asia Pacific
http://www.flickr.com/photos/breakfastcore/3114817008/
Jim Carroll’s excellent post on Wind Tunnel Politics reflects an idea he came up a couple of years ago – the notion of ‘wind tunnel marketing’ – an idea that Emma Cookson (Chairman, BBH New York), Jim (Chairman, BBH London) and I have been chatting about a lot again recently.
Given the traffic, RTs and positive comments the first post got, we felt it was perhaps time for a more thorough analysis of its impact on what most of us reading this do for a living – the development of brand communications.
We’d like to get the debate going and involve people from all sides – client, agency and research. So please let us know what you think.
Here we’ll look at three things to start the conversation:
I. The origins of the problem;
II. The results; and
III. Some potential solutions
Then we’d like your point of view.
1. The Origins of the Problem
Pretty obviously the world is now crammed with very good, largely parity products across most sectors. With the consequent decline in any real, viable notion of product USP’s the industry has increasingly turned to understanding the consumer as the key source of competitive advantage.
The Holy Grail is a breakthrough ‘consumer insight’. Something that cracks open consumer motivations around a category in a new and fresh way and as a result allows a brand to more powerfully pitch its product or service.
Indeed many companies now have entire departments focussed solely on consumer insight. Some of you reading this may have it in your job title.
And, looked at one way, it makes a lot of sense.
After all, isn’t the whole notion of marketing about ‘satisfying the wants, needs and desires of consumers ‘ ?
There is, however, one rather significant problem with it.
Everyone is looking the same way and largely following the same path.
Frequently doing the same research, with the same consumers via the same research companies on essentially the same products.
The result won’t surprise anyone – they get to very similar places.
So while marketers and their agency partners consistently (and rightly) talk up the critical importance of differentiation, most of our industry is wedded to a ‘best practice’ process that inherently takes them another way – to greater sameness.
2. The Results
Are self-evident and everywhere (ever noticed how hard it is to think of major brand examples of ‘great’ outside of the usual suspects?)
From mid-range family salons that, when unbranded, even car fanatics fail to recognise ( and can you remember the make of the ‘reasonably priced car’ on Top Gear ?…….you’ve probably seen it about 30 times ) to entire categories where the work is just too interchangeable (looked at any skincare advertising recently?) Even brands aimed at youth (where one would assume a greater leeway to pursue difference) seem to be merging into one – an event with a DJ and some free form skateboarders anyone?
From a marketer’s point of view all this serves to do is to make it a game of scale of resources again.
He or she with the biggest distribution network / media budget / sales team wins. The cost efficiencies of genuine brand differentiation are notable largely by their absence.
Yet, because large organisations inevitably (and understandably) need logical ‘handrails’ for staffers to follow, few are challenging the standard, solely consumer insight oriented process currently in place.
3. Potential Solutions
People need systems. Very few of us are individually brilliant enough to be able to operate day in day out in the trenches without them. So an imploration to just ‘go free-form’ is unlikely to be of much use to most companies.
It seems to us, however, that the handrails that need to be put in place need to actively force diversity of thinking.
They need to be ‘hydra-like’ in that they need to regularly have the potential to lead to many different places – not always back to the same spot.
The CIA ‘Problem Definition Checklist’ does this (if you want a copy let us know). When properly followed, the Disruption model does it. Interestingly, in his latest thinking, Adam Morgan is suggesting a far more diverse range of different types of challenger brands (and no doubt different ways to develop them).
For our part at BBH, we are re-committing to one of our oldest strategic tenets (and simplest of thoughts) – ‘insights from many sources, not just consumer’. The product, the brand, the way category operates, the retail experience, the media landscape, etc, etc. – all are ripe for investigation – and all should be.
We are also re-committing to the future.
There’s something interesting here. As per the famous Akio Morito quote - “we don’t ask consumers what they want ; they don’t know. Instead we apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make sure we are there ready” - the future is surely what we should be trying to work out the likely terrain of, rather than analysing that of the present or the past. Perhaps the most powerful model we are now trying to get grips is a fusion of brand insight with consumer foresight. Note – not consumer insight – but rather an understanding of where the market is likely to go rather than where it has been.
As we said at the start, we’d like to hear what you think. If this rings true, what are your thoughts on potential solutions?
28 comments on “Wind Tunnel Marketing, The Sequel: On the Need for Divergent Insight”
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Mel Exon
Thanks…just as I was getting settled into a nice, comfortable definition of what my profession was all about.
um…
There were six men of Hindustan,
to learning much inclined,
Who went to see an elephant,
though all of them were blind,
That each by observation
might satisfy his mind.
The first approached the elephant,
and happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
at once began to bawl,
“This mystery of an elephant
is very like a wall.”
The second, feeling of the tusk,
cried, “Ho, what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear,
This wonder of an elephant
is very like a spear.”
The third approached the elephant,
and happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
thus boldly up and spake,
“I see,” quoth he,
“the elephant is very like a snake.”
The fourth reached out an eager hand,
and felt above the knee,
“What this most wondrous beast
is like is very plain” said he,
“‘Tis clear enough the elephant
is very like a tree.”
The fifth who chanced to touch the ear
said, “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
deny the fact who can;
This marvel of an elephant
is very like a fan.”
The sixth no sooner had begun
about the beast to grope,
Than seizing on the swinging tail
that fell within his scope;
“I see,” said he, “the elephant
is very like a rope.”
So six blind men of Hindustan
disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
exceeding stiff and strong;
Though each was partly in the right,
they all were in the wrong!
Faris
I think you’ve discovered a new niche in the management book market – strategically relevant poetry. I look forward to your first compendium !
Charles
Nice post and analysis. I really believe that brands and agencies need to stop thinking about creating more and more ways to use what is new – or do what is ‘hot’ right now. They need to generate great content/platforms that express strong brand ideas and start conversations allowing to participate.
People are real and believe in stories and brands that touch the right buttons because they know them and their frustrations. Most of the times they are gestures and big ideas that are solutions to real problems: nike+, whopper sacrifice, assurance, think different, people against dirty, just do it…
As Bob Deutsch said “To be a great marketer, first forget about marketing. Think about life. Then you’ll be a great marketer.”
Ideas are all over the place, but are they in sync with the brand and it’s purpose – that is another point.
What I’m about to say certainly isn’t revelatory, but I do agree that we need to stop looking for a better “expert” opinion on things.
What if agencies, rather than look at consumers through a cultural anthropology lens, actually hired consumers. That’s right, add the position of professional consumer to the staff. This person’s job would be to go shopping. To pick up the kids from school. To go to the movies, to go on vacation. In short, to live the life of a consumer, but do so under the auspices of the agency.
This person, man or woman (preferably both, and from a wide array of demos) would have an office/desk/cube and would be expected to spend 2 or 3 days in the office. Not only would you gain some anecdotal insights, but I think the rest of the staff would learn from the professional consumer in a way that you wouldn’t from mere focus groups.
Ok, was that crazy?
Rick
Yes it was. But also very smart. Obviously keeping them in the agency too long would turn them into us …..which would be about as much use as a choclate kettle….but I love the notion of bringing specific audiences in for specific projects for a week or two. Thanks for the idea.
Charles
yep crazy and smart.
as long as you don’t let them get tainted…once ‘consumers’ understand themselves as ‘consumers’ they stop being ‘consumers’
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2006/12/the_paradox_of_.html
Dialing your point back a notch, agencies could gain significant leverage by reorganizing themselves around segment expertise rather than medium expertise or client responsibility.
Have a team dedicated to executing plans aimed at moms, teens, males 18-34… rather than force generalization based on client goals or medium understand that niche audiences that require authenticity more and more from advertisers are tiring of “imposters” imposing their presumptions of need, rather than diving in headlong & truly understanding the needs.
If I were starting an agency today, I’d have three layers: (1) An abbreviated client team — works as PMs, organizing work across (2) Niche Demo teams — work as consumer experts in key demos, plans contact strategy and represents vested consumer needs, with (3) Media Experts — manages the vendor relationships and does all the $$/cost stuff agencies need to do these days.. but to be honest, if the niche stuff truly takes you might be able to charge a premium for the media bought..
Yes Rick. Lovely idea. But as Faris mentioned, at some point they will become us.
i started thinking, how can we stop being who we are and become the consumer we were and then back to who we are ? how can we genuinely be both ?
Juan
Let us know when you’ve worked it out. It could certainly be useful ! Maybe there are some psychologists out there who could chuck in their thoughts on this ….
Charles
As a communications media student and professional consumer, I find this highly interesting. I would much prefer that agencies utilized a multimodal approach. The dynamic of consumers defining how they want information delivered is an important aspect, however, if I wanted to dictate that completely the result wouldn’t be nearly as effective as when an agencies can get me to want something in a different way – perchance to use it now versus later, or to understand its utility in my life in a way I hadn’t imagined. Driving desire and understanding is truly powerful. Great post and certainly inspiring.
Thanks for reminding us about the relationship between what goes in, and what comes out. It’s too easy for us all to focus on output and pushing for breakthrough work going out of the Factory gates, at the expense of looking at how the Factory actually works.
One relatively successful initiative we’ve been testing at BBH in New York attempts to – in some way – address the wind tunnel effect. It’s fairly simple, but I think therein lies the value. It can be trialled today.
We have started to run ‘ideas sessions’ at key points in the strategic and creative development process. These sessions deliberately bring together and collide people and thinkers for eclectic backgrounds in a super-tightly focused ideation session that is moderated incredibly tightly too.
It sounds like a brainstorm, but it’s a long way from conventional brainstorming. We use the diversity in the room to produce a broad range of ideas in a very short space of time. These are then reduced down to a more manageable number of areas which are recycled and built out, often by carefully cast (& deliberately differently composed) smaller groups. Oh, and did I mention homework dished out a few days before . . . things start with ideas, rather than blank Nobo boards.
This all happens in two to three hours.
We’ve just started experimenting with bringing partner agencies and clients into the sessions (you cannot underestimate the value of co-ownership) and we’re now ready to trial bringing in externally-sourced ‘divergent’ thinkers. It’s important that you stretch the parameters of what might be possible by stretching the breadth of experiences and viewpoints.
This (I know) sounds incredibly A, B, C in nature, but it actually works. Every single platform idea we’ve developed on the Google projects on which we work has been arrived at in this way. It’s hard to do well, but highly rewarding for teams, as well as being more efficient.
So not quite bullseye on theme re your post but a reminder that how we work is frequently as important as whom we work with.
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Part of the Tunnel Effect, IMHO, is the general nepotism that exists in marketing. Marketers HIRE marketers. The HR Depts. and managers of ESPECIALLY in marketing companies tend to look for resume’s which match the specific tasks needed now, just as they end up creating solution only suited to the “now”.
Hiring people from outside the marketing sphere, but who have insights from relevant experiences will create internal disruption. Notice that I didn’t say chaos. When your staff is all like minded, you end up with a same, same, “yes-men” mentality and a staff with largely similar experience attitudes and solution paths. NEW marketing ideas will come from diversity of thinking. Hiring a team made up of professionals from different disciplines will produce different results, and if paths taken in turn are followed, further differentiation in those results each time.
Which could be more effective? A team made up of people all from the same professional segment, using understood, trusted methodology trying to conceive new ideas? Or a team made up of professionals from different backgrounds pitching their diversity of successful problem solving into a new idea?
Breadth of experience will win the day over laser focus in cracking open new ideas in marketing. Effective management of the process is the only challenge.
Darin
A very fair point. I suspect that those of us in agencies ( rather than client side ) are equally guilty however.
Charles
I think you mean over estimate. Thanks for the idea. We do something similar, but not quite as disciplined. Sort of Tim Brown like. Good stuff.
My favorite line is what you write is one of BBH’s oldest tenents: “insights from many sources, not just consumer.”
I believe it’s still comes down to the consumer, but the problem with relying solely on consumer research is that it doesn’t consider the consumer’s entire world, the world in which products live and mean something.
Cheers to approaching advertising from a more holistic approach.
Perhaps the issue comes down to what we are prepared to accept as creative – in a commercial sense.
We tread a fine line between developing what will stand out (and be embraced) – and developing something so out-there customers would gloss over it.
(All standard stuff. Yes, yes. Get on with it.)
If a brand wants to stand out – genuinely stand out – it has to put itself beyond what most people would see as “crazy, trying to make a point” and into “maybe they are genuinely mad” territory.
And most companies (95%, reaching up my arse for a statistic) don’t have the money or the emotional commitment to make that leap.
And most agencies are so busy chasing money – the need to feed the beast, as it were – they are not in any kind of emotional position to push the client beyond ‘acceptibly crazy.”
(Maybe that’s just the agencies in Australia – cynical old bastard me.)
Most businesses – agencies and their clients – need provable ROI now.
Which means so very few businesses succeed at standing out. (Thank you, Homer Simpstein.)
My point?
For a genuine breakthrough,it doesn’t matter who you ask – all anyone can give you is a view created by their experience.
The insights we need need to come from the future – where “genuinely mad” has already become “acceptibly crazy” so businesses can feel some sense of confidence in embracing the commercial insanity we’re putting up.
Ask an inventor. They’ll explain it better than me.
Great post. Is it possible to get my hands on a copy of the CIA checklist?
We’ll be sharing the CIA Checklist once Chaz gets me a copy to throw up on the blog. Probably end up with BBH being closed down by the CIA, but let’s see . . . Ben
What customers expect are for companies to innovate, take risks and reap the rewards (good and bad) of delivering products that disrupt and come to define the market.
The companies that innovate the most successfully are those (not surprisingly) themselves led by innovative leaders – the ‘usual suspects’ you reference.
Most companies don’t fall into that category, mainly because Wall St is highly suspicious of go-go CEOs in the mold of Jack and Carly (even Steve is perceived as a bit of a problem because of the succession issue).
Consequently we’re stuck in a phase of blue eye-shade ‘leaders’ with two eyes on Wall St and a short-term view of delivering ‘shareholder value’. (This goes for the vast majority of ad agencies too – especially, ahem, those owned by the Big 4.
Beyond innovative products, what people really yearn for is much, much better customer service, delivered consistently across all channels (not just Twitter
). Despite this obvious need, ‘customer experience’ remains generally dismal, again with noble exceptions like of USAA. Talk about opportunity for differentiation.
Can agencies develop practices that help clients with product innovation? Perhaps…but that’s a pretty tough place to play. Innovation typically comes from the top down and the inside out.
What about better customer service? Definitely yes. Agencies could be marketing practices, methodologies and processes that help their clients genuinely understand and serve their customers’ needs.
Let the client focus on product innovation. The agency’s role should be to help them go to market more successfully (with marketing and advertising just one facet of that).
Sadly I don’t know of any agencies that actually offer those services. It’s hard and unglamorous work, and it involves getting much deeper into a client’s business and silos than most agencies typically do.
A lot of fair points here Jeremy – especially re : customer service……
Is there a way to put the customer /worker/ developer into the future before asking them the question?
(Through stories, perhaps. Or theatre-based imaginings. Or through sensory suggestion.)
Find a way to get them out of their immediate experience before asking them to redefine that experience?
Interesting thought John.
Some years ago we worked with a researcher who got people to ‘dream’ what they thought the future would be like and then draw it.
It certainly made for a more stimuluating sort of de-brief.
Great to see someone else is having the same conversation, however, we’ve been referring to it as ‘Blinder Marketing’ – put the blinders on, aim for the finish line, and get there as fast as you can.
Ultimately, consumers don’t know what they don’t know – even in this age of seemingly endless choice. Ten years if you would have asked a consumer if they would have wanted to carry around 10,000 of their songs in their pocket, what would have the response have been? How about having the ability to compete with millions of runners around the world, each and every day? Hmmmm….
Blinder Marketing is about validation, not innovation and inspiration. Looking to create a category breaker for meals on the go/protein drinks? It’s not going to happen in a room full of housewives talking about their lives. Try going to the ICU unit at a hospital to find out how nutrition is delivered to those who have no other choice, whack some spag bol in a blender and see if that passes the test (uuum… no), speak to the new breed of celebrity chefs and see what would inspire them for the ulimate meal on the go. And only then with the inspirational input, do you end up with innovative output.
I agree with the post, thanks Charles.
I really like the idea of looking for insights everywhere and also getting a grasp of the whole system of experiences surrounding us. I think key is looking and finding patterns across disciplines – sciences, arts, design – and understanding what the commonalities are and what the differences. Inspiration for great ideas could shortly follow once we have developed this “intuition” to see through the chaos and “feel” where it is going..
[...] a recent BBH Labs post (Wind Tunnel Marketing, The Sequel: On the Need for Divergent Insight) that talked about the need for divergent thinking and stimulus in approaching problem solving [...]
Isn’t all of this just the essence of creative thinking? And the best creative thinking is what stands out?
What’s changed?
I am totally with you on this and this comes from a “consumer insight” agency.
The problem particularly in Asia, is rife. Little point in pointing the finger and trying to identify why – I think I’d say partly agency’s (research) in not challenging a brief enough, but as someone pointed out earlier it’s that balance between winning business and putting out the ‘best’ work; partly client’s in terms of being risk averse and believing more in process than results and the desire to validate thinking rather than inspire.
As a research agency we are often asked for THE insight, but we would argue that there isn’t just ONE insight, but multiple insights and it’s where those insights collide that you get the real meat for unlocking new ideas – and this is what we define as ‘inspiration for action’.
This always means looking at a problem from multiple points of view and borrowing from different disciplines that can open up thinking rather than close it within the walls of the focus group room. (Plus a healthy dose of common sense).
This is not to diminish the role of consumer research, but we believe that research should ALWAYS go beyond the consumer and would never consider ourselves to be consumer mouthpieces. Sadly we are, on occasion, always asked that dreaded question of “did the consumer say that”…well no, not always – hey you don’t pay a psychologist to tell you what the patient said, you get them to diagnose and treat. Well why wouldn’t you pay a research company to do the same. If all we were there to do was deliver consumer response there would be no point – just come view the groups.
Good research isn’t about ‘research’ it’s about thinking using whatever tools and approaches are appropriate to deliver a sense of direction.