Traditional market research techniques focus on data and metrics; on logical analysis. These provide only a fraction of the available knowledge and insight necessary for effective innovation for several reasons:
- Data mining is effective for uncovering insights into your current customers’ current buying habits. It tells you nothing about people who never were customers or who eventually might be.
- Human behavior is influenced by many factors, most of which aren’t conscious or rational, and, therefore, can’t be quantified.
- As UCLA professor Theodore Porter wrote in the preface to his 1995 book, Trust in Numbers (Princeton University Press), “quantification is a technology of distance.”
Rather than being distant from our customers and prospects, we want to be closer to them. We want to be close enough to understand their needs in the context of the emotional world they live in.
Empathy, the language of proximity, is more important than numbers when it comes to delivering successful innovation. Empathy is what gets us closer.
Deeper knowledge comes from getting into the customers’ minds and hearts to really, thoroughly understand their needs, what works well for them, what doesn’t work so well, and where their pain and frustrations are within the context of their particular situation.
A deep understanding of customers and their needs, worries and motivations also enable us to find common drivers of behavior shared by otherwise diverse target markets.
Innovation starts with empathy for our customers’ dissatisfactions, frustrations and aspirations. Empathy for the people we want our ideas to matter to.
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