TMRE 2010: Injecting Emotion into Market Research--from by Dan Heath's TMRE Keynote

By Kathryn Korostoff, Research Rockstar LLC

Our first keynote today was Dan Heath, a generally well known author and columnist, perhaps most well known as the co-author of 'Made to Stick.' His keynote focused on his most recent book, co-authored with his brother Chip, 'Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard.'
Dan acknowledges that "Change is hard.: and "People hate change." Those were two of the most common things he and his brother heard when they began to work on the book.

But, he also observes that some change is good. Wedding photos are full of happy faces'and this is a HUGE change. Having babies, also a huge change.

So why are some changes hard, and others are easy'even joyful?
The answer comes from the fact that we have two systems in our brains. the rational/deliberative side, and the emotional/automatic side.

When these two systems align, change can happen. When they're not, change can be painful.
So, how do we make these two systems work well together?

The Heaths' thesis is reflected in a metaphor.

To switch or change, we need to recognize there are 3 parts of the system:

• The rider, our logical person, who is quite small compared to the elephant. May be a naysayer'who says stop and think. And who thinks he is in control, but he's on an elephant. In a disagreement, who'd win?
• The elephant is our emotional person. Needs to be fed. It is big. Bigger than we care to admit. The elephant needs motivation.
• The path, which is the direction. The rider needs direction.

BTW, as Dan amusingly points out, the elephant doesn't care about PowerPoint.

The elephant tells you to eat ice cream, check your email over and over when you should be doing 'real work', or to call an ex when you are drunk.

But the elephant is also good. It's what gives us cool new ideas. It is the fuel to make progress, change.

But this all points to a problem. In a lot of situations, we have objective information'but a desired change is not happening. In market research, this can be that we have delivered some amazing data pointing to a new product opportunity, but we can't get the management team excited enough to actually take action with it.

At this point, Dan made a transition, bringing in the topic of how we find out how to solve problems. His key point here is that we have a flawed approach:

We tend to ask what's broken and how do we fix it, instead of what's working and how do we clone it.

Why do we do this? Psychologists say bad is more powerful than good. We remember bad stuff longer. We look at negative pictures longer than good ones. When asked to recall experiences, people more readily recall negative things than positive things'whether about a place or a person.

Dan's suggestion is that we need to study success as diligently as we study failure. He calls this, 'finding the bright spots.'

We also need to be crystal clear that knowledge rarely leads to change. Lots of products have warnings'even cigarettes. Factual information rarely impacts us.

In businesses, we can deliver facts, figures'and it rarely leads to change. We need to produce a feeling. To illustrate this, Dan shared the case of John Stegner, a gentlemen who worked at a huge manufacturing firm, in the finance department. Stegner decided they could save a lot of money by centralizing purchasing, and he even had a spreadsheet that showed $1 billion in savings over 10 years. A billion dollars'anyone should pay attention to that, right? Apparently not. During his presentation, his colleagues nodded, they were polite. But nothing ever happened. So one summer, he hired an intern. He had the intern go round the company and go to every factory and collect a sample of a work glove purchased by that factory. Turns out the company buys over 400 types, with each site's average cost ranging widely. Then, Stegner takes over a conference room, and dumps the 400+ glove samples, with average price tags attached, and brings in the colleagues. They come in, they see the gloves. They see the various prices. They have emotional reactions. They are shocked at the price variations. They are stunned at the number of different styles. Within months, Stegner had approval to centralize purchasing.

He had a spreadsheet that's showed $1billion saving. Then he dumps gloves on a table, and they are ready to move. WOW.

Dan's take away from this is that even for organizational change, we need to see and feel and that is what gives us the desire to change.

And then Dan did something many keynote speakers from outside of the research world don't do. He tied this all into market research. Dan observes that in market research we don't instill the emotion into the process.

He observes that our process is to focus on data, then insight, and hope for change.

He points out we need to inject emotion into the process: we need data, insight, emotion, and then CHANGE.

As an example, he cited a Microsoft research project where the researchers found that 6 out of 20 users couldn't use a feature in a product they were testing. But the developers didn't buy in to the results. So the researchers had the developers join the focus group process. By having the developers observe the research, they found inspiration (I also think of this as an issue with proximity to data, which I wrote about awhile ago here: ARTICLE ).

As Dan correctly points out, market researchers understand data. We all know how to collect great data. What can make us stand out, as researchers, is our ability to add the emotion so that actual change occurs. His bottom line?

When people change it is because they have clear direction, motivation, and a clear path.

BOTTOM LINE

Practically speaking, what does this mean? Well, based on this keynote, it seems we need to do at least 3 things:

• Pictures. Photographs that make a point'even if extreme, or humorous.
• Proximity. Keep research users close to the process, so they can experience the research'and not just get a slide deck three months later.
• Find our bright spots, and clone them. What was the last great project you did that had real impact? What was different in that project?