Beyoncé on Analytics and Research
In a recent interview with Harpers Bazaar, Beyoncé said;
I remember being in a meeting discussing analytics, and I was told the research discovered that my fans did not like when my photography was black and white. They told me I wouldn’t sell if it wasn’t in color. That was ridiculous. It pissed me off that an agency could dictate what my fans wanted based on a survey. Who did they ask? How is it possible to generalize people this much? Are these studies accurate? Are they fair? Are all the people I’m trying to uplift and shine a light on included? They’re not. It triggered me when I was told, “These studies show…” I was so exhausted and annoyed with these formulaic corporate companies that I based my whole next project off of black and white photography, including the videos for “Single Ladies” and “If I Were a Boy” and all of the artwork by Peter Lindbergh for I Am…Sasha Fierce, which ended up being my biggest commercial success to date. I try to keep the human feeling and spirit and emotion in my decision-making.
To paraphrase; Beyoncé's issue is that there is a difference between what an agency 1 says her fans want and what her fans actually want; by ignoring what the agency said would sell (and keeping the "human feeling, spirit and emotion" in her decision making), she created her biggest commercial success to date.
That isn't to say that I don't like "analytics", or "surveys" or "studies". If I didn't use any of them, there wouldn't really be much left of my career.
But they are just tools - tools that can be used well, or used badly.
I've worked with my colleague Heather Dansie to put together a training session about "insights", which is build around a framework that starts out with turning data (that is, the information we have about the world around us) into "truths" - which means understanding that what the data says and what it really means aren't necessarily the same thing. (Another colleague - Jon Manning - has written about a practical example of how this process applies to media planning.)
Like any kind of data; there isn't really such a thing as "good data" or "bad data" - data tells you something about the world; it informs a model of the world.
All models are wrong, but some models are useful.
So the question you need to ask is not "Is the model true?" (it never is) but "Is the model good enough for this particular application?"
What Beyonce tells us - something that I think many "data people" in the media and marketing industry would be wise to pay attention to - is that there is a difference between "the data says that our customers won't buy something" and "our customers won't buy something".
Maybe the data said that fans prefer colour photographs. Maybe when presented with a side-by-side comparison, they usually prefer the colour photograph. I can completely believe that to be true.
But the conclusions that you can draw from that are limited. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the Pepsi Challenge (where people are given two unlabelled cola drinks, asked to taste both and say which is their favourite - which is usually Pepsi), and quotes Carol Dollard "who worked for Pepsi for many years, in new product development";
If you only test in a sip test, consumers will like the sweeter product. But when they have to drink a whole bottle or can, that sweetness can get really overpowering or cloying.”
Gladwell explains that Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, giving it an inherent advantage in a sip test. Pepsi is also characterized by a citrusy flavor burst that tends to dissipate over the course of an entire can. Pepsi, in short, is a drink built to shine in a sip test. Does this mean that the Pepsi Challenge was a fraud? Not at all. It just means that we have two different reactions to colas; the reaction after taking a sip is different to the reaction after drinking a whole can/glass/bottle; "In order to make sense of people’s cola judgments, we need to first decide which of those two reactions most interests us." The Pepsi Challenge tells us about sip tests - and makes for a great TV advert - but Coke's continued decades-long dominace in the market probably tells us more about the product that most people prefer to buy and drink.
Likewise, I don't think it should be surprising that people prefer a colour photograph to a black and white one in a side-by-side comparison. Does that mean that they won't buy Beyoncé's product using black and white imagery? Of course not- what the data says and what it means are two different things, and again, the sales data tells us a broader story.
Another iconic figure who is well-known for speaking out against 'research' is Steve Jobs; via a Medium post;
Jobs: “Some people say, ‘Give customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!”‘ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
This seems to me to be a different angle to the same sentiment that Beyoncé was expressing; don't give your customers (or fans) what they say they want if you can give them something that they don't even know that they want yet.
I think asking customers what they want is fine, so long as you remember that "the data" isn't "the truth" - it takes analysis, interpretation and synthesis to get to the next stage. Henry Ford knew what the data would have said ('a faster horse!') - but he knew that the truth behind it was 'speed'. And thats exactly what he gave them. Jobs doesn't dismiss what customers want; he says that their job is to figure out what they want before they do. That doesn't mean not doing research - it means not relying on research alone to get to the underlying truth, or the actionable insights that inform decision making. Like Beyoncé, Jobs made sure to keep the "human feeling, spirit and emotion" in his decision making.
“On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, ‘Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the phone?’”
The Macintosh was the first successful mass-market all-in-one personal computer to have featured a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse. If you're relying on "what customers say they want", you're unlikely to give them a first.
The Macintosh came out in 1984 (I think I was unaware of computers other than the ZX Spectrum and perhaps the Commodore 64 at the time- my dad happened to work in computers, and I was lucky enough to have one in my house that I could play with at a very early age); but it was the same type of thinking from the same company that led to my own "not knowing what I wanted" experience.
I was an early adopter of mobile phones. I got my first mobile phone in 1995 when I was 18 (any earlier and I wouldn't have been able to sign the contract; pay-as-you-go wasn't an option back then) when I worked as a software tester in a mobile phone R&D centre that happened to be near where I lived, and happened to be recruiting from a temp agency I was registered with. So, I spent days running various tests on various types of phones, meaning I got to sit around and play with different kinds of mobile phones to see which ones did particular jobs better than others at a time when most of my peers had never even got their hands on one. I chatted to radio engineers about 3G networks when 2G was only a year or two old, and about what 'bluetooth' would mean once the batteries got more powerful and the phones got more power efficient. I got excited about the idea of sending my mates SMS messages when all the phone software engineers were telling me that they would never be features that customers would use or care about (because why type out a text message when you could just speak to someone or send a voicemail?) I played around with creating ringtones. I got my first smartphone in 2002, and I customised Windows Mobile homescreens as a hobby.
The point I'm trying to get across here isn't that I was particularly clever or perceptive - just that I happened to be in the right place and right time to get a tech nerd like me really into mobile phones at a very early stage of market adoption.
Had I been asked by a market researcher what I would want from an iPhone, I know that I wouldn't have said "a touch screen you can touch with your finger instead of pretending that your fingernail is a stylus", because I didn't know that was even possible. I certainly didn't know that you could have a screen that you could use two fingers on with pinch gestures. I didn't know that a browser on a pocket-sized computer could render desktop web pages that could be zoomed in and out, because the pocket-sized computers that existed simply couldn't deal with the basics of rendering them in the first place. I didn't know that a touchscreen keyboard could be smart enough to tell the difference between the tiny keys you pressed and the keys you meant to press.
So, when the first iPhone was released, I thought it was interesting that it didn't fit any of the various industry definitions of a "smartphone"; at the time, Smartphones had QWERTY keyboards. Smartphones had 3G for fast mobile data. Smartphones worked like computers and you could install your own applications by plugging them into a PC; the original iPhone didn't fit any of those criteria. You could easily conclude that Apple weren't paying attention to the smartphone market - they weren't even making a proper smartphone.
But my god - having spent a couple of years with stylus-based resistive touchscreens, keyboards with 40 little buttons squeezed into a pocket-sized device, and hours trying to build websites that would work on Internet Explorer on phone just as well as on a PC, it was screamingly obvious that the iPhone's user interface was the future - what we were calling 'smartphones' in 2008 were going to be no more relevant than the 'feature phones' we were moving away from. The hardware was a generation ahead, and the software was leaving the competition in the dust. (When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and announced his ambition, it wasn't anything to do with share of the smartphone market - it was about share of the total mobile phone market. He knew what people wanted, and he knew perfectly well what a 2007-era "smartphone" was. And he knew that they were not the same thing.)
Having an iPhone in my hand2 and seeing "desktop" web pages - or a YouTube video playing on that tiny handheld screen was seeing the impossible actually happen. It was what I didn't even know I wanted; the whole world in my hand, without any wires, or even buttons. It was magical.
The iPhone didn't come from ignoring what people wanted. It came from listening to what people liked, and didn't like, and working out what they wanted on one hand, and what they could imagine and the limits of what they could possibly create on the other... Steve Jobs understood how important the difference was. And Beyoncé understands how important that is.
(When I wrote a post about why this website is not data-driven, this is basically the point I was trying to get to. I wasn't surprised to see it better articulated by someone else - but I have to admit, I wasn't expecting to find it in a Beyoncé interview.)