Henry Ford famously said “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

This observation is lost on many marketers today.

People don’t know what they want. Yet companies like Vodafone, Yahoo and T-Mobile have repositioned themselves and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on being whatever you want them to be.

A Branding Strategy Insider article titled, “The Danger of You Centered Branding” has this to say:

Vodafone is spending millions declaring 'Power to you'. Yahoo! is proclaiming: 'There is a new master of the digital universe. You'.



Meanwhile, T-Mobile is launching its myTouch smart-phone by asking consumers to imagine a 'one-of-a-kind phone for your one-of-a-kind life'.



'We are about you,' say these brands. 'Whatever you want, that's what we are.' It's very 'co-creative', 'empowering' and all the other things 22-year-old marketers crap on about.

Unfortunately, it's not going to work, because when you don't stand for anything, you get eaten alive by competitors who do.

How very true.

Successful companies like Apple continue to create products that people didn’t know they wanted until they were invented. They are empowering their own brand, not some nebulous idea about who the customer is and wants.

They know their success is founded on the substance of their products.

In a TED talks video, Malcolm Gladwell describes how Campbell’s Prego spaghetti sauce overtook the dominate brand, Ragu, by giving people something they didn’t know they wanted. And in so doing, changed the entire food industry.

Success or failure starts with the product, not the marketing and advertising campaign.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

After all the research, focus groups and C-level selling is done, what's left of the marketing budget is spent on a campaign message. At this point, the message is often so homogenized and watered-down, that it’s madness to think that it would work at all.

Yet, this process is still typical in even the most sophisticated marketing organizations.

Failure is met with shock and surprise. “How could this not work?”  “We tested everything and reflected our consumer’s needs and wants in every picture and copy point.”

Budweiser is a prime example of this myopia. An article in Advertising Age, titled, “Budweiser’s Big Blunder: Letting Consultants Steer Brand” had this to say:

Shortly after August Busch IV was named CEO of Anheuser-Busch, he accepted a company director's recommendation for a consulting firm that would assist with managing the brewer's burgeoning brand portfolio. The firm, Cambridge Group, ended up going far beyond portfolio management. In fact, its exhaustive research resulted in the "Drinkability" campaign that -- four years and millions in fees later -- is considered a major factor in Bud Light posting the first full-year sales decline in its history.

Do you know your audience? Really know them? I wager that despite collecting, collating and deciphering all the research they can about their target, most companies don’t know squat. Just like Cambridge and Anheuser-Busch.

The reason is that most marketing organizations are consumed by their own rigid and collectively agreed upon definitions of their target group, as if it’s a completely unique sub-genre of the human race.

Mark Earls sums up marketing's obsessive dependence on target research nicely in his article, “The New Audience”:

Since its earliest days, marketing has prided itself on putting the people who buy the products being marketed (or the 'consumers', as we've got used to calling them) at the heart of its thinking and processes. You could argue that the fundamental point of marketing (as well as its primary contribution to contemporary culture) is the idea of organizing business around the needs, wants and desires of the people who buy its goods and services.

Along the way, we've come to rely on certain ideas about these people – how they do what they do, how they make the decisions we seek to influence, the nature of the relationship between us and them, and the importance of the role we play in their lives.

He goes on to suggest that this is changing. That perhaps the assumption that thought proceeds action, is in fact wrong:

In recent years, science has encouraged us to rethink much of what we took for granted about the people who make up our audiences. We have learned that thinking is much less important than we imagine in shaping our behaviour. Much of our decision-making is essentially automatic and based on shorthand and heuristics; we often do stuff and make sense of it later. Cognitive behavioural scientists, such as Kahnemann and tversky, and Nudge authors thaler and Sunstein, have catalogued the cognitive biases that have come from our “lazy brain's” use of shorthand and heuristics for decision-making.

Thought can be a barrier to action. Too much of it can get in the way and in fact become paralyzing. Think about it. We learn by doing the things we do, not by being told, or informed. Especially not by an inanimate brand fronting an organization with a vested interest.

So, if you’re trying to change perceptions, it’s important to keep in mind that perception change is a result of changed behaviour, not the other way around. That is, if we are trying to change perceptions then we should probably be thinking about the behaviour change required to do so. And if we are simply trying to change behaviour we shouldn’t put the need to change perceptions in the way as a barrier.

Mark Earls also suggests that the key to behaviour change is in influencing and learning from each other:

Equally, we've come to understand that we are a fundamentally social species. Our minds are supremely adapted for a world of others, rather than for independent thought. Our ability to learn from each other (via 'social learning' and the disembodied accumulation of others' knowledge and skills we call 'culture') is now widely seen to be the key mechanism behind the spread of all kinds of phenomena, from the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, and whether we vote or not, to the names we give our children. Many now believe this must therefore also be the key to changing such behaviour.

The best companies seem to innately know this. Companies like Apple and Nike place less importance on dissecting their audience and more importance on offering products that people want and want to talk about. In Apples case, products that people will line up for when launched, as if they’re attending a rock concert.

I’m going to say something radical. Challenge the target research, if not chuck it altogether.

Dare to be different and meaningful.

Rather than chasing your target, have the courage to attract and lead.

People will buy your brand based on an alignment of values, ideals and attitude - sometimes even more so than if the product actually fulfills a need.

Once again, take Apple for example. It’s not like as if anybody needs an iPad. Yet the internet has been buzzing about it since it was announced. And on April 2, you can bet to see lineups.

Mark Earls concluded his excellent article with this:

Next time you find yourself thinking about your audience, please remember this: they're very different from what we've been told – less considered and deliberative and certainly much more influenced by each other than even they'd like to admit. More importantly, they're not really an audience in the way that received wisdom suggests – passive and dependent on what you offer. They're not 'listening' and, to be honest, they're not yours. If they're an audience at all, it's first and foremost for themselves. And therein lies the opportunity for marketers.

How do you feel about your own marketing efforts? Is it the way you’d like to be marketed to? Is it something you’d be proud to tell your friends about? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.