Beyond what consumers say: finding the insights that lead to better products

Great consumer research isn’t about asking consumers to design the answer. It’s about uncovering the tensions, behaviours and unmet needs that give R&D a better, highly relevant problem to solve. What consumers report isn’t necessarily where the innovation opportunity sits.

Consumers know more than they can tell you

Henry Ford is believed to have said that if he’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses. The insinuation is that true innovation doesn’t come from research, it comes from expertise. Reality disagrees. To innovate, you need to understand what your consumers want. Both their desires and the frustrations they have with current products. The everyday annoyances they assume are unfixable, and the makeshift solutions they’ve cobbled together to get by.

Sometimes consumers can’t articulate what bothers them, because their workarounds are so habitual they don’t even register as workarounds. This is where watching them matters more than asking them. Whether you watch people use a product in person or ask them to film themselves doing it, you see what they barely register. On a shaving project, we found inexperienced users regularly nicked themselves but when questioned, they simply accepted it as part of the process or put it down to their own technique rather than the razor. That gap between where people place blame and what was actually happening was where the opportunity was.

When you understand what’s not working, it’s your technological know-how and expertise that are key to designing innovative products that overcome those frustrations. The challenge isn’t whether consumers know what they need. It’s whether conventional questioning can uncover it.

Looking at products in the context of real routines can also reveal hidden jobs and unmet needs that conventional category-based questioning misses → case study

The innovation opportunity often sits in what consumers don’t say

It’s easy to assume that if you ask someone how they feel about a product, they’ll give you an honest answer. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. It’s not that people are being dishonest, in fact, it’s often the opposite. They’re usually so keen to help that they’ll say something even if it isn’t quite true. There are a few reasons why what people say doesn’t always match how they feel or how they actually behave. The first is habit. So much of what we do runs on autopilot that we accept small niggles without ever noticing them, let alone name them as unmet needs.

The second is language. It’s easy enough to describe a frustration with a piece of technology, but much harder to find the words for something abstract, a feeling, a taste, a smell. And then there’s sensitivity. Subjects like money or relationships can feel too exposing to answer honestly, especially in a group, so people hold back for fear of judgement.

So how do you work around this? The Untapped Product User Journey™ is one useful tool where we ask people to film their own behaviour and talk through their thoughts and feelings as they go. For more abstract feelings, projective techniques can help, asking someone to share an image that represents how they feel. A wilting flower, say, to show what a demanding day feels like. If you accept that even the most well-intentioned people struggle to express their needs, you can start designing research that helps them do it anyway.

For R&D, that distinction matters. If the consumer has misdiagnosed the problem, taking their answer literally can send development in the wrong direction. The opportunity comes from understanding the experience behind the answer.

Our free Snapshot Guide gives you four practical principles for uncovering richer, more useful consumer understanding.

Observation gets you closer to the problem but, it isn’t yet an insight

Deciphering an insight from an observation is a real challenge, so much so that many people struggle to tell the two apart. So let’s start by defining each. An observation is a description of something factual and obvious. It doesn’t take much digging, it’s something anyone might notice and describe. An insight is different. It reflects a deeper understanding that changes how you look at a problem and points you towards a solution. So how do you know which one you’ve got? An observation doesn’t give you anything new; it’s more likely to get a “so what”. An insight feels fresh, includes a tension and often obvious in hindsight, the “how has no one thought of this before?” reaction.

Meal kits are a good example of a product built on an insight. The observation was straightforward – busy people don’t have the time or energy to cook from scratch, so they turn to ready meals. The insight went deeper. Ready meals were convenient and let people try new flavours, but because they hadn’t cooked the food themselves and they didn’t know exactly what was in them, ready meals felt like an unhealthy and unsatisfying shortcut. Meal kits solved that. Fresh ingredients, ready-weighed, an unusual spice or two, and just enough actual cooking to give people a sense of pride and relief that they could quickly create something good quality and very satisfying.  

A useful insight creates productive tension for R&D. It doesn’t prescribe the product; it reframes the problem in a way that opens new possibilities for what the product could do. There’s a lovely quote, with an unclear lineage, that says ‘discovery is seeing what everyone has seen but thinking what no one has thought’. If you think of an insight as a discovery, you’ll know it when you see it

Sometimes you need to stop asking direct questions

Projective techniques are underused in qualitative research, largely because people assume that if you want the answer to a question, all you have to do is ask it. But as we touched on earlier, research participants aren’t always able to give you a rational answer. For any question where you need to understand people’s feelings, thoughts or motivations at a deeper level, projective techniques are indispensable, because they let people project those thoughts onto something else, something a researcher can then decipher.

Techniques can include asking people to share images that represent their thoughts and feelings about a product, or asking them to draw their thoughts and feelings, or fill in speech bubbles. Another is asking what celebrity, or animal might represent a product. Once they’ve shared their ideas, it’s worth asking directly why they chose that image or celebrity. Sometimes even they’re surprised at what bubbles up.

These techniques give people another way to express thoughts, feelings and associations that can be difficult to articulate through direct questioning alone.

Better insight gives R&D a better problem to solve

Deeper consumer insight gives R&D more than an interesting observation. It creates a richer understanding of the people they’re designing for: what they’re trying to achieve, where current experiences fall short, and what a better experience could look and feel like. By staying close to the user, and working alongside Insights and other partners, R&D can translate that understanding into product Attributes, Technical Mechanisms and Measures that will make a meaningful difference. Because when user understanding and technical expertise stay connected throughout development, we’re far more likely to create products that make people’s lives better.

See how deep qualitative immersion turned human tensions and unmet needs into 4 investable growth platforms and 20+ validation-ready concepts → case study

Written by Sharon Powell
Qualitative Researcher, Brand & Marketing Consultant