In walking the massive floors of the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in Jacob Javits Center last week, we noticed the same themes and language echoed throughout the great halls of exhibitors serving the retail industry: analytics, big data, and other research tools—services and technologies for improving your customer intelligence in an effort to better compete and serve your customers.
With retail’s major shift toward statistical analysis and improvement of data-gathering technologies is important, its easy to arrive at the belief that all business decisions need not be made, but rather analyzed.
This important shift toward objective data and statistical analysis isn’t just happening in the retail industry but virtually every field of knowledge and inquiry. And this, ultimately, is a good thing. The more reliable objective data we have, the more accurate knowledge we have. The more accurate data CEOs have about their customers, their competition, and the overall marketplace, the better informed decisions they can make.
Armed with big data, chief executives have a powerful form of intelligence to access and mine in their pursuit of market dominance, brand loyalty, improved ROI, and greater profitability. What better way to become obsessed and knowledgeable about your customers than to have access to reports that highlight customer interests, activities, perceptions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with your brand.
The Dark Side of Consumer Research
All good things, however, can be taken to extremes. Objective data and statistics is one form of information. It is the kind of information technology can provide as well as the kind our logical, rational minds love. But we (and our customers) are not purely rational beings.
Humans often behave irrationally and any customer intelligence that doesn’t address our irrational side is incomplete and can lead us astray. And with raw analytics alone it is difficult to penetrate our customer’s psyche, to mine the unconscious motivations and less rational aspects of our customers.
This means that we can’t exclusively rely on technology to inform us about customers and markets. We need to tap into our innate human faculties as well.
The Missing Ingredient in Consumer Intelligence
Intuition and feelings are doorways to our customer’s irrational perspectives. When we learn to access these functions in ourselves, big data and market research can become an empowering servant instead of a dominating master.
Big data needs human assistance. We must learn to access our left brain (logic and reason) AND our right brain (intuition and non-rational) in our interpretation of consumer data.
Then, magic can happen. Statistics begin to dance and our customers come to life; our understanding of them (and perhaps even ourselves) finds new ground.
The Future of Market Research
Our experience shows us that CEOs who adopt a more humanistic understanding of their customers will become better leaders of their organizations and will be better equipped to interpret the massive amount of data companies will continue to generate about their customers.
These well-informed chief executives will lead their business to market dominance by better addressing the needs of their customers and their employees. They will be able to make superior decisions and spot consumer trends before their competitors.
We’ll discuss ways humanistic psychology suggests we can open up to these non-rational functions in an upcoming post.