Listening to customers or studying them isn't enough if you really want to incorporate your brand into their daily lives. This week's Advertising Age features an article co-authored by Agathe Blanchon-Ehrsam and myself which addresses this problem. The article evolves around one of the main themes of Hidden in Plain Sight: understanding the ecosystem of consumer demand. Feel free to read the full version here or read it in the "CMO Strategy" section of the printed edition. Here's the article's introduction:
Want to nail down your consumers' wants and needs? Then don't just listen to them. That's because just listening to them won't reveal what you're looking for. Observing them won't either. And if you are using survey research or ethnographic research to better understand your consumers, think twice. The bottom line is, you may not be leveraging the best tools to understand your customers. The biggest opportunities for building your brand or growing your business lay in plain sight -- but you might not see them.
Existing approaches are not altogether useless; marketers simply don't know when and how to use them. Marketers typically listen to consumers to identify a need or want that can be fulfilled by the company -- to identify unserved, unmet or unarticulated needs. Survey research then asks consumers what they need or want and to what extent these needs or wants are satisfied. The problem with this approach is that it is largely useless to ask consumers what they want. They can not know what they have not experienced.
