Wall Street... I'm placing initial blame on you. In the 1950s we saw unprecedented innovation, largely fueled by our country's Post War efforts. But the companies that brought all of these new ideas to the market place were a different breed than today's. American business was focused on quality and innovation and not tethered to a rapid and wired stock market. Today, companies are bound to the Street's demand for squeezing profits out of every quarter -- and only business results anchored in those time periods matter. So, we loose long term focus to get a few more pennies out of the stock price.

This short term thinking often fails to accommodate the longer time periods to understand customer needs and develop great, meaningful products. Any request for dollars is met with a response demanding specific financial results within the next 90 days. But beneficial customer insight requires patience and rigor, yielding results that may not be visible until several quarters, possibly years depending on development and manufacturing cycles. The result: all of those crappy products and annoying, irrelevant marketing messages.

What innovation require are senior leaders with the balls to foster a collaborative, discovery driven culture and put some dollars behind initiatives to better understand customer needs as generate as many new ideas as possible.

If that doesn't happen, then just go private.

Having past experience with ethnographic research, I certainly can attest to the unbelievable value you get from observing people. I'm shocked more companies don't do more of this, but I guess everyone is still bogged down in quantitative data. The problem is, quantitative data tells you 'what' is happening (assuming that you ask the right questions or know what to look for), but what it doesn't do is tell you 'why' people are behaving that way. A deep contextual dive can deliver insights you'd never find elsewhere.

There are a couple new kids on the block that add some interesting flavors to the qualitative research pie. I call it automated ethnography because these techniques enable a constant flow of insight from a larger sample size than you would get from traditional in situ observation.

First, there are recruited online communities. Companies like Communispace or Hive Live recruit several hundred people to join a closed community focused on a brand or subject. The service provider has staff members to maintain the community and administer tasks to learn specific things relevant to the host company. Additionally, the community members can carry on without intervention. According to Communispace, members of their communities are more active that those of open communities.

The second is a category often called Brand Monitoring. Firms include Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Cymfony (TNS Media), MotiveQuest, Umbria, Brandimensions, Visible Technoligies, and Biz360 (interactive agency VML also has a related service called SEER). These services scour online communities, forums, blogs, and other social venues to track conversations about a brand or subject. In some cases, these service providers can detect sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) or even emotional attributes discovered through text analysis.

I'm in no way advocating that these services replace the need for good old, get your hands dirty, ethnography. On the contrary, I actually feel like they are a fantastic compliment to contextual research. What's unfortunate is that so many companies haven't been enlightened by the insights that can some from this type of research.

I'm plugging in to day 3 of CES. The first day was a bit overwhelming. This show is so massive and it can be a bit confusing wandering around trying to figure out where things are. Additionally, wayfinding is a BIG problem here. I'm surprised after all these years that conference organizers haven't found a better way to help people navigate the spaces and events. I had to rip an ADA map out of a catalog just to get a single overview page of the facilities here at the Las Vegas convention center.

On a separate note, one big take away from the show is that there really aren't any innivative new things to see. Surprisingly, virtually every firm is showing off it's incremental improvement of last year's product. I mean come on, is one plasma TV really that different than the next. And all they really have is a few more inches than last year -- they must have been responding to all those spam emails we get for "getting bigger."

I'm just surprised that I'm walking through throusands of booths with virtually every major company in the world showing off their best stuff and I'm actually a little bored. That coupled with the fact that nobody can tell a story using their booth designs as a support for their communication, it feels like somewhat of a wasted opportunity.

Attention Design Schools: Assign wayfinding design projects and contact conference organizers to see if they'll let you take a stab at it -- they need the help bad. And, imagine the attention you would get or nailing the wayfinding for a conference as big ass CES...

I just landed in Las Vegas for the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Pete and I are hitting the floor to see the latest and (possibly) greatest technology from all of your favorite engineers.

I’ll be curious to see if there’s anything actually useful there, or if it’s just a bunch of technological bullshit. My big question that I’ll ask all of the vendors is “why this.” I’m seeking any insight into how they ended up with the product solution they’re presenting. I’ll bet it’s all driven by engineers with some neat idea rather than a thorough research process to unearth core needs and deliver a relevant solution. But who know, maybe I’ll be amazed.

[Thanks to goynang for the pic.]

I’ll post pix and commentary over the next few days. Hopefully I won’t lose too much cash.

I recently published a Forrester report titled Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement (more detail here on the Forrester Marketing blog). One interesting aspect of this research was presenting the idea that the marketing funnel is more complex than we may think. I initially presented to my fellow marketing analysts an idea that suggest the funnel was dead. That didn't go over so well, which demonstrates how sacrosanct the funnel is to marketers. However, they also presented a good point that the current funnel (awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, loyalty) is meant to provide a framework for marketers to understand all buying decisions at a meta level. With that, I proposed, and published, that the funnel is more complex, not necessarily dead. The point here (see graphic below) is that the center of the funnel is a lot more complex now. There are a lot of addition factors impact a person's decision making process.

[Click to view the full size image.]

Another insight here is that we need to think differently about what a 'valued customer' is. Traditionally, we think a person that buys a lot from us (at a profitable price point and not necessarily at discount) is a good customer. We through in other factors like frequency and dollar value of purchase, but overall it's about buying. However, one of the ideas I present about engagement is that someone that contributes content that influences others to buy (even if that creator doesn't actually spend much with you) could be extremely valuable. If someone only buys from you once a month, but every time they buy they write an extensive product review that increases the likelihood that readers of that review will buy — that's a valuable person too.

[Thanks to Critical Massers Scott Weisbrod and David Armano as well as Blake Cahill from Visible Technologies for helping carry on the conversation. I'll come back to this idea here very soon.]