But don't expect your discoveries to dictate your company's direction. Rather, that sort of research should gently guide product-development and marketing efforts. Oh, there's another catch: to gain a new perspective on your product or service, you must cast aside your own biases--and your divine intuition--about your product or service. If the consumer is to teach you anything, you must be open to the lesson. "Entrepreneurs often mistakenly try to 'fix' the consumer's faulty point of view," explains Blackwell. "But that's not research, that's selling."
For Shamir, it was a breeze. Having been away so long, he couldn't assume much about the American shopper. And that's precisely how the curious entrepreneur must approach market research: detach yourself from the intimate knowledge you have of your product or service. Although it might sound like heresy, try to forget what makes your product irresistible.
Of course, that's far easier to say than do, as Julia Knight, founder of Growing Healthy Inc., a Minneapolis maker of frozen baby food, discovered. Knight had worked as a vice-president of marketing for Minnetonka, a fragrance and cosmetics designer in Minneapolis. When she held her baby-food package in her hands, she couldn't help recalling the hours of toil spent on the most minute design elements. "As a marketer you can spend hours on something that consumers barely even see," she says. "The hardest thing is to become an innocent consumer again."
When Knight began her foray into frozen baby food, in 1989, she was a newly married 31-year-old. To capture the consumer's perspective, Knight would dress in a blue-jeans shirt and leg warmers (it was Minnesota, after all) and then roll through the aisles of local supermarkets. "The dress was critical because you feel much different in casual clothes than if you're wearing high heels and carrying a clipboard," says Knight. "I was literally trying to shake off my marketing self."
But initially, her in-store vigilance led to frustration--even agony. "It's painful to watch consumers pick up your product and then not buy it," warns Knight. It wasn't always easy for her to listen to dissenting consumers. The tendency was to explain to each customer why her baby food should be a best-seller. But she soon learned that "you can't convince customers one at a time to buy your product."
Instead, she immersed herself further in the role of the consumer. Not yet a parent herself, Knight enlisted friends who would go with her on shopping runs, taking their children along. With kids in tow, she began to see why so many parents dread the supermarket: one child screams while the other lurches for the chocolate bars. The research also revealed a potentially fatal flaw: kids don't like the frozen-food section; it's too cold, and parents are under pressure to move speedily through the icy aisles. So Knight sought a warmer climate for her product. She lobbied supermarket managers to place cutaway freezers in the baby-food section.
By 1996, when Growing Healthy was sold, the company had climbed to $2.8 million in revenues. But it had been a constant struggle, and one that reaffirmed the breach between the customer's words and their actions. Now it all makes sense to Knight. "What mother, especially in front of other mothers, would really tell you that she spent more on cat food than on baby food?" she asks. But her observations had shown her otherwise.
Lurking behind shoppers is one way to get the skinny on the habits of the average Joe. Another is to watch potential customers actually use your product. That's why many companies pay a high price for behind-the-glass focus groups. The trouble is, consumers rarely act in real life the way they do in a "laboratory" setting.
So some clever entrepreneurs have replaced focus groups with small gatherings in more lifelike surroundings. There they combine anthropological observation with the sort of open-ended questioning you might hear in a therapist's office. The bonus is that real-world focus groups often don't cost much. In fact, if you're smart, they may just earn you some extra cash.
In 1991, Brendan Boyle and Fern Mandelbaum created Skyline Products Inc. to invent and license new children's toys. The twosome knew little about toys and even less about children. Boyle had been a product designer for David Kelley Design, in Palo Alto, Calif., developing items such as water bottles and other sports accessories, while Mandelbaum prospered as a marketing guru for Giro, makers of bike helmets. To get a boost up the learning curve, the two cleared a path straight to their target audience and created a focus play group.
Silicon Valley's harried parents are all too willing to enroll their children in Skyline's six-week play-group sessions. Six to eight kids get an hour with the latest games and toys on the market, and Mom or Dad gets an hour off. The groups typically meet at local parks or schools; Boyle and Mandelbaum appear as the Santas of summer, carrying a slew of toys.
Boyle admits that as an adult, it can be pretty easy to lose touch with a child's perspective. "You learn so much just by getting down on the ground with the kids," he says. "You can really forget how small their hands are or how much bigger your wingspan is."
Throughout the hour, the two owners probe the children, asking why certain toys are more appealing than others. "We're searching for a range of opinions," says Boyle. "Many kids will give that to you. They'll say, 'This sucks,' or 'This is awesome." On the other hand, some children hide their true likes and dislikes with strangers but reveal all in the car ride home. That's why Mandelbaum and Boyle frequently follow up with parents.
The parents themselves provide a trove of information. Just watching their facial expressions as their child gallops around with a newfangled toy can indicate whether they'd be likely to buy, says Boyle. Occasionally, Mandelbaum gathers parents into informal groups for brief grilling sessions. There, once again, the striking contrast between the consumers' words and actions becomes apparent. "We ask them in the beginning if color matters, and they all say a resounding no," recalls Mandelbaum. "Then at the end, when we give them something for Johnny or Suzie, they all clamor for the purple one or the blue one."
