Why talking to customers may not lead to success

Disclaimer: This blog is independently written and published by me. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

In the age of customer empathy, it might seem outlandish to not take ask for product suggestions from your customers. As a product lead for Research and Development at Capital One, I asked consumers if the design of their credit card mattered to them (the physical material, colors, pattern, weight etc). They almost unanimously said things like “absolutely not”, “it’s the rewards that matter”, “other people would care about that, but not me”. There was a clear consensus from the research: credit cards are utilitarian, an object that simply provides functional value.

But then I came across a research study that made me question what I heard and learned from customers. The researchers found that people would often forgo using a card with more reward benefits in order to use the platinum card in social settings. This provides evidence that in certain contexts there may be values, such as social signaling, that are more important than rewards and that a credit card can be more than a functional object. 

JOBS TO BE DONE

As a follower of “Jobs to be Done” methodology pioneered by Clayton Christensen, I knew that products can offer emotional value to customers beyond a purely functional value. Emotional value can be in the form of making the consumer feel a desirable way (e.g., successful, beautiful, cool, fashionable), or showcasing favorable qualities to others (aka ‘social value’).

Beats headphones is a great example of emotional value. If Beats creators had asked customers what they cared about when choosing headphones, they most certainly would not have said “looking cool”. Rather, they would have talked about technical specs and thought about past experiences with headphones and what they liked and didn’t like.  For decades headphones were made to satisfy a functional utility and brands competed to offer consumers the best technical features such as audio quality or noise cancellation. Beats did something radically different. They focused on building consumer value by making the wearer feel and look cool (an emotional job) even while arguably having inferior audio quality. Ultimately Beats was acquired by Apple for $3 billion.

Many companies continue to miss big opportunities to differentiate through emotional value. Why is that? The benefit of emotional value through design is less concrete and tangible for product managers and designers to articulate. And who’s to say what’s trendy or professional, or know how your customers want to feel without asking them? This is hard work. Furthermore, imagine trying to champion the case for design in front of your stakeholders when your own target consumers argue profusely that the design doesn’t matter to them. So which is it? How do you make the case that design matters when your customers are saying the opposite?

SOCIAL STIGMAS

I tried to understand why what people say and what they do can be different things. One thing in particular that I found interesting is that researchers have found consistently that people actively conceal that they strive for status, even though they found that stays striving is ubiquitous in everyday life. This is just one of those cultural rules we all abide by and don’t even think about. One study found that people negatively stereotype materialistic people and associate problematic personalities to them (like insecure and self-centered). Most of us know these stigmas intuitively and have been conditioned by our culture to avoid these social stigmas. These stigmas have only grown greater, especially among the affluent, now that materialism is more accessible to all (anyone can get their hands-on luxury goods or knock offs).

Credit cards are naturally associated with status. It is tied to your wealth and for many cards you have to be approved. It’s also a symbol of materialism — the ability to buy what you want. Thus, it’s a dangerous territory for trying to avoid social stigmas and conforms with more traditional forms of luxury that millennials are eschewing. Conspicuous status is moving away from platinum credit cards and toward conspicuous experiences (like posting your vacation photos to Instagram). Both demonstrate status, but one is less obvious.

Our brains have many motivations and we are good at managing most of them on autopilot. One of our motivations if to manage our social impressions and with do this even when we don’t realize it. While there is a desire to signal positive qualities about yourself to others, there is also a need to avoid negative social signals, and sometimes these two things overlap and so what we hear from customers isn’t necessarily what they will do.

HOW TO LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS

So what's the formula for success? Should you listen to what customers say or not? The answer is… listen with caution but focus your energy on gathering data about what they do (how they behave) rather than how they hypothesize what they might want. Our decisions are often based on emotion and may not be logical at all. When designing research, carefully design studies to find out how customers want to feel about themselves and whether they view your product as congruent with that feeling. (Need help on this? Contact me!)

The wildly successful Chase Sapphire Reserve card is a great example for a better way to display status for the millennial generation. It allows its customers to display status while giving them a different and much more socially acceptable reason for having the card. Chase Sapphire Reserve members tell their friends about the no brainer rewards and benefits. Talking about these benefits have social capital  —  consumers feel smart and savvy (qualities that are not stigmatized). They can talk about how they used their travel points for their last awesome vacation to Tahiti. Ultimately the card demonstrates high status in a subtler way and avoids the stigmas of the traditional black, gold, and platinum cards that are simply ostentatious. This leads me to my concluding recommendation.

DESIGN TO CONVEY & CONCEAL STATUS

Design your product such that it evokes high status while carefully giving avenues for concealment of the stigma of status.  Display status in a subtle way. If your product is materialistic, ensure there is an additional feature that isn’t stigmatized that the consumer can point to as the reason for having that product. For example, BMW drivers likely won’t tell you necessarily how cool and powerful they feel when driving their car or that their emotions were involved in making the purchase, but they’ll be quick to point on the technical specs that make their car special and socially acceptable.

For more on these topics, I highly recommend reading “Customers Included” by Mark Hurst and “The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class” by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett.