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.
But Techsonic's situation -- creeping up on desperate -- put management in a good position to pay attention to new ideas. On February 17, 1983, Balkcom, Dyer, and Bill Moorer, vice-president of operations and chief operating officer, had proposed a leveraged buyout of Techsonic. They knew, Balkcom says, that breathing life into the company would take some dire measures. Talking to consumers would be expensive, as would designing new products. To take that risk, they wanted more than token equity. And the investors had never been too keen on reinvesting earnings. After several months of negotiating, Balkcom got them to agree on a price that was roughly 30% higher than what he had hoped to pay. Or rather borrow, since bank loans comprised about 90% of the purchase price. "After the LBO was done, the three of us looked at each other and said, 'Do we really know what we're doing?' " Dyer remembers. "The answer was no."
One thing they were doing was spending a lot of money. By November 1983 Balkcom had to go to the bank and plead for an advance of $400,000. Much of that, he figured, would go toward paying Symons. A visit to one city, where she would hold two focus groups, could easily run to $6,000. The quantitative phone surveys cost, on average, $30,000. Then there was Huey's time and the costs of sending company executives to study different technologies and listen to customers.
They had already made some pretty fundamental, if radical, decisions. Consumers seemed to like the graphic representations that chart recorders provided, but they couldn't see these finders in sunlight either. They also wanted something easier to use. "We couldn't go after every problem," Dyer says, "so we decided to focus on those."
A group met regularly in the summer of 1983. Brown, the 3M veteran, urged the executives to consider finding a new technology that would overtake their competitors.
How about cathode-ray tubes? Too big.
Can we use thermoluminescent displays, like the ones in car dashboards? They wouldn't withstand the temperatures.
Hmm, Huey said, how about waterproofing a paper-chart recorder? Not technologically feasible, Gibson replied; it's probably not possible for two years. Then forget it, Dyer interjected; I want this in six months.
On one end was Dyer, always pushing for an ultrasophisticated unit, one that moved paper electronically and zoomed in on targets easily. On the other side sat Brown, his warnings to keep the price down sounding like a constant backbeat. "Don't forget your place in the market," he'd repeat. "You are the 'flasher' people. You have an image in that end of the market." The give and take was not always genteel. "Everything got spit out," Dyer recalls. "We were hollering, but we were also listening."
