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Are Current Customers Innovation-Inhibitors?
Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s superb Harvard Business Review article, Innovation: The Classic Traps, re-surfaced an idea I first pondered in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma:
Listening to current customers can inhibit breakthrough innovation.
I remember taking great exception to this notion upon encountering it, but slowly and begrudgingly coming to accept the quality of Christensen’s insight after much resistance. I’ve always approached marketing and strategy trying to peer through the customer’s lens.
As a result of my explicit consumer bias, I’ve used and relied on market research. Listening to current customers has not only been a priority for me, it has been the priority. I’ve vigorously agreed with Sam Walton’s terrific maxim “Whenever you get confused, go to the store. The customer has all the answers — and all the money.�
Kanter’s article started me thinking again about how to reconcile these ideas. The reason I’m obsessed with their reconciliation is pretty simple and straightforward: I believe that our current business and marketing models in the performing arts are broken. The old adage, “The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results� definitely applies.
What I see going on among arts administrators is exactly that: trying the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results. Of course, it’s a little more nuanced than that.
What is more accurately observable is that people are trying to do the same things — only better — but expecting different results. In other words, most arts marketers are working on improving the quality of their tactics when the problem is that the strategy is wrong and the model is broken.
As I reflected on what I would call a clash of marketing ideologies (at least as they relate to innovation), it occurred to me that talking to the customer — and especially observing the customer in the natural habitat (what marketing anthropologists do) — can be made to serve innovation purposes.
So how can Christensen and Walton both be right?
It boils down to what we talk to the customers about. Asking customers about what they like or dislike about the current product or service will cause them (and you) to focus on incrementally improving what’s current. While I’m not against incremental improvements in products and services (I think they are very important, indeed), this focus won’t lead to innovation.
To innovate, we need to focus the customer on describing their needs and aspirations. We need to know what it is that they hunger for at very deep levels. We need to think about engaging professional observers to analyze customers’ uses of our products and services so that these uses can be compared and contrasted against what they say they crave. A professional observer is capable of considering more than behavior, but also state of being, e.g. ambient mood.
This is why working with a professional research team is so critical. It is so easy — especially as an amateur — to assume that we know how to frame questions or more importantly, what to focus our queries upon. I take pretty strong exception to amateurs doing market research. The advice “Don’t try this at home� is worth following. I've been blessed by being able to work with a firm that I consider the best in the country in arts marketing research: Shugoll Research, so maybe I've been spoiled. I can tell you this: it is amazing how much value a professional researcher adds when it comes to making strategy choices.
I’m reminded of the hysterical observation about someone alien to our ways landing and observing late-night dog-walkers scooping and bagging doggy poop after being dragged down the street on a leash. Truly, an observer alien to our culture and behavioral norms might conclude that the pooch’s human tender was the inferior and subservient being.
Making business decisions on faulty research methodology can lead to an express lane straight to perdition. Not only can wrong-headed choices be made, but they are often made with conviction. Bad choices burn up resources that could be fueling good choices.
In summary, Christensen’s observation that talking to current customers can limit innovation can be true — and often is. Sam Walton’s insistence that customers can erase confusion is likewise true. It depends very much on how we learn from what we hear and observe. Professional research and sound query design guide — accompanied by rigorous analysis — should guide that learning. The customer can be an ally in the innovation process, or they can be an inhibitor. It depends on how appropriately we cast their role.
Posted on January 5, 2007 10:50 AM | Permalink
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