Follow The Herd, Not Your Customer
Look forwards not backwards. Analyse individual customers and you miss the crowd. Just ask real innovators. “Our job is to figure out what [customers] are going to want before they do,” said Steve Jobs. “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
If you asked Apple’s iPhone customers to describe their dream phone in 2006, who would have imagined a touchscreen? Apple didn’t listen to their customers. They understood the market, the direction of innovation, reinvented an everyday product and told customers what was best.
‘Know your customer’ is well-intentioned but myopic. The customer profile says: 24-30 year old, male, mid-level job, single. Not a real person. Not how you’d describe a friend. Take a step back. Aggregated data trades on retrospective assumptions with no predictive eye to the future. If you only have eyes for the individual customer, you can't run with the herd.
In a period of unpredictable disruption, trusting an individual profile becomes increasingly worthless. It doesn’t tell you what your customer will do next.
Remember, the iPhone was launched on the eve of the biggest financial disruption in recent memory. Ferrari was founded on the eve of the Second World War, as a producer of machine tools and aircraft accessories. The company launched its first car only two years after the war had ended. Amid social upheaval, Enzo Ferrari famously said of unpredictable consumer desire: “The client is not always right.”
So, take a cue from Apple and Ferrari. Flip the coin.
Businesses are run by teams, not individuals. The success of the team is the success of the business. The westernised view of the infallible customer is ill-conceived. Ad-man Mark Earls blames Western individualism for producing the stubborn belief that some individuals are better than others. Yet you need to consider the whole market to make informed decisions.
James Surowiecki, author of ‘The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few’, agreed. Drawing on ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’ he proved the ‘experts’ (phone a friend) are right 61% of the time while the crowd 91%. The many are smarter than the few.
While Rachel Botsman discussed collaborative consumption in her 2010 TED Talk and its power to change consumer behaviour, we should perhaps consider how markets move en masse to shape demand.
While we used to stop at the customer profile, we now have the resources to map markets with artificial intelligence. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of businesses adopting AI grew by 270%. Seize the opportunity to drive your decision-making in a brand-new way. Inform your business on future looking market analysis, not historical customer data. Williams Nicolson has developed a way to map markets with artificial intelligence so our campaigns deliver beyond individual sentiment.
Building a business in uncertain times is challenging. But flip the rear-view mirror. Understand your markets and tap new resources. Don’t look back to the solo consumer because he will follow.