If you've been on Instagram or Facebook recently, you've probably seen the hashtag #nofilter. This means that no special effects or filters have been applied to enhance or modify the picture. In other words, what you see is what you get—it’s an authentic portrayal.

As marketers or researchers, our job is to discover consumer truths. We accomplish this through qualitative or quantitative primary research, understanding market trends, and good ol’ first hand observation. But sometimes along the way, the truth can get shifted, altered, polished—or in some other way—filtered, which can ultimately lead to faulty decision making or sub-par execution in market.

Here are some common “filters” to watch out for and a few quick tips to help:

• The Curse of Knowledge: If you’ve been working on a brand or in an industry for a long time, you can start to feel like you know it all and there’s nothing new under the sun. To cope with vast amounts information, the brain naturally develops short cuts and heuristics that inform how the world is organized.  A simple example of this in marketing is a Target Consumer description—we can’t possibly know every single person who fits within the definition, so we compile and summarize data to create a story for a single composite individual, who is the Target Consumer. The problem is that if we observe something that doesn’t fit with what we know, or what we think we know, we tend to unconsciously overlook it or even consciously discount it (in psychological terms, to prevent “cognitive dissonance”). The problem is that sometimes the pieces that don’t fit can actually lead to the biggest insights.   

• Quick Tips: Get perspective from colleagues outside your immediate brand or category on a research    report—see what stands out to them. Invite newer team members, interns or even business partners     who usually don’t attend consumer research to attend and contribute. Use a moderator with limited     experience with your company or industry. 
  

• Drawing Conclusions Too Early: We’ve all been there—it’s the end of the 2rd consumer interview out of six planned or you’ve reviewed only half of the countless pages of the latest survey data. You’re starting to see some patterns and our biologically lazy brains want to stop working so hard, so you just make the flying leap to a key learning point and start to switch your thinking into “action mode”--what to fix or adjust or a new feature to add, etc. The problem is that you’re so busy drawing conclusions, coming up with recommendations or literally revising the research stimuli in real time that you miss critical learning and only get a fraction of the value of the research. 
  

• Quick Tips: When attending qualitative research, write your notes in actual consumer language and     capture real-time observations as much as possible. This not only forces you to stay mentally present,   but gives you great input for analysis & synthesis later. Take time to process what you’ve learned         before drawing conclusions. If possible, give a bit of time between the conclusion of qualitative             research and the team debrief session, or, read over all the data from a quantitative study to let your     brain start finding all the patterns before jumping to the executive summary.

• In-Going Personal Biases or Hypotheses: Developing hypotheses before consumer research is a good thing, right? Well, it depends on whether you’re approaching the research with an “inquiry” or an “advocacy” mindset. With an inquiry mindset, you have questions and hypotheses and you are seeking the answers, to either prove or disprove your hypotheses. If you have an “advocacy” mindset, you are only seeking to prove your existing assumptions and are looking & listening for data points that support your argument. There’s a time and place for advocacy-based approaches in business, but to uncover deep, rich consumer insights, an inquiry mindset will get you to the complete truth so you have the salient information needed for decision making.

• Quick Tips: Before a consumer research project of any kind, spend some time as team sharing and         capturing assumptions and hypotheses. Acknowledging those up front can make you conscious of any   potential biases and capturing assumptions as a group can help hold everyone accountable after the     fact. Once you have the conclusions, go back to that list and do a check. If everything you learned         lines up perfectly, you either really didn’t need to do the research in the first place or you all deserve a big raise—or, consider whether some existing biases or assumptions may have colored your                   interpretations.
  

So, the next time you participate in qualitative research or analyze consumer survey results, make sure you use #nofilter to get the most authentic and insightful view of your consumers or customers.

What is Design Thinking?

Briefly summarized, it’s a form of solution-based thinking that starts with a specific goal and goes through multiple stages of iteration—divergence and convergence—to solve complex problems in a human-centered way.  Design thinking typically includes one or more of the following approaches: observation, interviews, brainstorming, and prototyping

Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, gives this definition of design thinking’s role within business: “Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity”.[i]

What Consumer Research Innovation Challenges Can Design Thinking Help Solve?

When leveraging consumer research for designing innovative new products, services or experiences, here are a few common issues that researchers face:

• People have a hard time talking about or answering questions about things that do not yet exist. Also, many people are not inherently “future thinkers”, that is, they have trouble imagining a world different from the one they live in today.
  

• Asking people directly what they want generally only leads to incremental improvements, not breakthrough innovation. It’s practically impossible for people to tell you what they will need in the future. Consider Henry Ford’s famous quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. 
  

• Too often, consumer research is treated as a “check step” in the process of innovation because teams feel like they have one shot to get it right and want to only show ideas once they’ve reached a high level of finish/finality.
  

How Can I Apply Design Thinking to Innovation-Focused Consumer Research?
Here are some tips for applying Design Thinking to Consumer Insights work in identifying new innovation opportunities and developing and optimizing innovative products & services.

Observation & Interviews
These approaches help build gut-level consumer understanding to allow the team to design solutions that will delight consumers, without asking consumers to tell us the future.

• Perform research in-context/Ethnography: Visit consumers’ homes, usual stores, restaurants, etc. to see them performing the task in question. Be on the lookout for compensating behaviors or cases in which what they say and what they do are inconsistent. If the idea in question doesn’t yet exist (e.g. a brand new technology), explore analogous situations or current substitutions with consumers.
  
• Build empathy for target users/consumers: Getting to know target consumers on a personal level and hearing their stories is a great way to build empathy. Try “walking in their shoes” in an anthropological sense. One example might be to wear thick gloves or tape several fingers to open bottles of medicine to empathize with arthritis sufferers. Or, one could try dramatically limiting discretionary spending for a few weeks to gain insight into the lives of low or fixed income consumers.
  

Brainstorming, Co-creation & Prototyping
These approaches help avoid the trap of waiting for a final or “perfect” product before engaging consumers as well as helping consumers react to something that does not yet exist.

• Co-creation: Consider involving select consumers in the creation process and use prototypes (drawings, skits, 3-D models, etc.) to not only bring ideas to life, but also give consumers something tangible to try, use and play with. Don’t wait until the product or service design is “final” to share with consumers for their feedback.  Allowing consumers to actually participate in making the product better while it’s still in rougher, or even conceptual, form may give teams completely new directions to pursue (while there’s still time to actually make the changes in the development cycle).
• Prototype to bring learning & insights to life: In addition to using prototypes in the product/service development process, think about how prototypes can help bring research learning to life across a variety of different objectives. For example, to deploy a new segmentation study, create scripts for each segment and engage team members to perform a skit to bring to them to life. Or, create a “studio” to immerse the team in the target consumers’ world and stock it with artifacts of his/her life.
  

Problem Definition & Iteration
These approaches can help to both design the most effective consumer research up front and give the flexibility to learn over time, without needing to have everything figured out before ever talking with a consumer.

• Extreme clarity on objectives and action to be taken: Precise problem definition is always the starting point for applying design thinking and the same should be true for every research project. In order to create the most effective research design, spend time up front getting crystal clear with key stakeholders on exactly what they want to learn and what action they will take as a result of the findings. Through this process, sometimes teams will discover that new consumer research is actually not the right next step!
  
• Iterative research: Learning is generally an iterative process—meaning, answering one question means walking away with 3 more—and learning plans should be designed with this flexibility. As a previous colleague used to say, “The only thing we know for sure about our first assumptions is that they are wrong.” It takes many iterations to create true innovation. Operating with the mindset of getting something in front of a consumer as early as possible and then keep going back after each refinement will help ensure the innovation stays human-centered and can progress quickly.
  

Consumer research in Front-End of Innovation brings certain challenges, but through the application of key Design Thinking principles, researchers can approach the learning process differently to not only help overcome these difficulties, but actually build stronger, more compelling solutions for the consumers they serve.

 

References & Recommended Reading:

i Brown, Tim. "Design Thinking." Harvard Business Review (June 2008): 85-92. Web.

http://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/thoughts/IDEO_HBR_Design_Thinking.pdf

Brown, Tim, and Barry Kātz. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: Harper Business, 2009. Print.

Lockwood, Thomas. Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience and Brand Value. New York, NY: Allworth, 2009. Print.

IDEO website http://www.ideo.com

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at  Sanford (d school, Sanford University) http://www.dschool.sanford.edu