Talk to my customers? Are you kidding?

Strangely, many marketers scoff at the prospect of actually rolling up their sleeves and talking to end consumers of their products or services. Marketing research seems to be synonymous with throwing together a survey or questionnaire and blasting it out to a selected sample of people. While this allows for convenience and breadth of coverage, it does not dig deep into what really makes consumers tick — and how products fit into their everyday lives.

Consumers are people first, and consumers second. Tapping into what makes them people provides valuable insight into not only current “usage scenarios” with your products and services, but potential situations for use, and thus opportunities. The argument for this deeper, richer level of research, often posited under the guise of ethnography, has been well documented elsewhere in books like Hidden in Plain Sight by Erich Joachimsthaler or How Customers Think by Gerald Zaltman.

But the fact that marketers often avoid doing this nitty gritty heavy lifting is disturbing. Even worse, I’ve found that engineering and R&D types can be even more averse to the proposition of listening to the “voice(s) of the customer.” The (Veblenian) attitude seems to be that if customers raise concerns over the designers’ creations, the problem lies with the customer and not the design of the product. In the world of help desk support, this attitude can be heard in the saying “the problem lies between the seat and the keyboard.”

The paranoia surrounding relinquishment of brand ownership and product design to the “sweaty masses” or “hoi polloi” via social media is an extension of this aversion to actually listening to what customers have to say, warts and all, and embracing (as opposed to criticizing) their natural imperfections as part of usability design. New product development professionals and marketers can either run from or attempt to exert control over the conversations going on in social media about their products, or they can listen and probe and better understand the lives of their customers — and how their products fit in.