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Nevertheless, with investors breathing down his neck and profitability dropping like a downrigger, Balkcom began to soften. He was running out of choices. And time. "We needed to do something different," he says. "Quickly."

The next time Huey started his pitch, Balkcom interrupted in his Atlanta-bred drawl, "All right, let's give this thing a shot."

Within months Balkcom would regret his decision. He was crowded into the company conference room, staring at what had to be the most expensive sheet of paper in the country. Twenty thousand dollars, and there weren't even complete sentences on it. Just phrases, each with a ranking, number 1 through number 45. And it didn't make any sense.

Number 1 was "sunlight." What would number 2 be -- air? Still, he sat patiently as Sue Symons, a marketing consultant from Atlanta, handed out copies of her report, which included 94 other pages -- a packet each to Dyer; Nunley, then marketing manager; Bob Gibson, director of engineering; Huey; and Erwin Brown, a former executive vice-president of electronic and information technology at 3M Corp., who served on Techsonic's board. Symons's methodology was unusual. She called it "vision interviews," but it sounded more like past-life regressions. One-on-one, she had asked fishermen, reclining in easy chairs, to tell her about their most recent fishing experience.

With a tape recorder rolling, she prompted them with questions. What was most frustrating? What was the most interesting thing that had ever happened? Traveling to Nashville, Atlanta, and Dallas, she hired local field services to screen potential subjects. She wanted people, she decided, who owned boats, fished at least 30 times a year, and had been reeling them in since they were kids. They talked about the solitude, about the struggle of man versus fish, about the camaraderie with their buddies. With her nudging, they talked about depth finders: what they liked, how much they spent, where they bought them. Then she had the tapes transcribed and analyzed the contents, searching for oft-repeated verbs and common emotions.

From that data, Symons designed questions for a more quantitative telephone survey. Using names from fishing- magazine subscription lists, she oversaw about 1,800 interviews. Then she employed cluster analysis -- lumping the answers together according to psychological or demographic factors -- to come up with a ranking of problems consumers had with their depth sounders.

Sunlight? The number-1 problem, according to Symons's research, was that fishermen had trouble reading their fish finders in bright sunlight. "We really had no idea how important that was," Balkcom says. Complaint number 2 wasn't exactly peripheral, either: fishermen found their fish finders too complicated. "Our conventional wisdom," Balkcom says, "was that fishermen liked to press buttons." Wrong again.

The list was as revealing for what it showed as what it didn't show. "There were things we had worked hard on that nobody seemed to notice," Balkcom says. Rarely was heard an encouraging word about Humminbirds being waterproof. And to splash saltwater into the wound, hardly anybody mentioned the company's three-day service guarantee. "We wanted to say, 'Gee, we're good . . . don't you folks know that?' " Balkcom says.

Beyond that, neither Balkcom nor his coterie of advisers could figure out how to respond to the data. If they think flashers are difficult, Huey suggested, maybe our ads should stress Humminbird's simplicity? Perhaps, Dyer offered, we could compensate by writing a lucid instruction manual.

Great ideas, but how did they know which one would alter consumers' perceptions? What, exactly, were they supposed to do with this newfound knowledge? "You can take this stuff and process it into a new product, or you can process it right into the trash can," Dyer says.

The distance between having this information and using it is wider than the mouth on the average trophy bass. It's not unusual for companies to fail to integrate what they hear from consumers into decision making. Sometimes the CEO flinches at spending the money to turn the implications into strategy. Or no one has the vision to translate the information into action.

It's not as simple as it might look. Everything consumers say has to be tempered with personal judgment. For instance, a group of interviewees can be affected by what one expert calls "the loudmouth factor," familiar to anyone who survived seventh grade. One participant bullies the others into agreeing, so that there appears to be a consensus when there isn't. Such factors make integrating consumer input as precise a science as, say, the study of chaos.

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