Australia's Ultimate Marketing Technology Almanac Oct 2015 | Page 5

brain photo looking a bit sodden.

Getting into the mind
of the customer
By Anna Russell

Social data analysis seems to offer a gold plated way of ensuring
the voice of the customer feeds into product development. However
it may not always be such a good idea. A 2012 PWC study of over
1200 CEOs across 60 countries found that two-thirds of business
leaders believed that incorporating the ‘voice of the customer’ in
management decision-making is critical to business performance.
But a study led by Prof. Johannes Hattula from Imperial College
of London and reported by Which-50 earlier this year has rather
set the cat amongst the pigeons. In a set of four quantitative experiments, Prof. Hattula and his colleagues challenged the idea that
‘think like the fish… be the fish…’ is the key to effective management decision making.
Which conventional wisdom suggests higher empathy should mean
more accurate predictions of consumer preferences, it may not. For
instance three-quarters of participants in Prof. Hattula’s study were
convinced that putting themselves into the customer’s shoes would
make them less susceptible to projecting their own preferences onto
customer decisions. The results of the research revealed precisely
the opposite.
As reported at the time, “Across a range of experiments in which
managers were challenged to get into the mind of the consumer
under various scenarios, Prof. Hattula and his colleagues found
that, irrespective of whether they were discussing product features
or celebrity endorsement, trying to empathise with the customer
‘activated managers’ own consumer identities and thus their personal consumption preferences’.”
The bottom line: The more the study’s participants tried to get into
the mind of the customer, the more their egos got in the way.

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