marketresearch

Customers don’t always want delight

I recently completed a post-booking survey for Expedia. One of the questions asked whether I felt “amazed” or “delighted” by the experience.

I paused. Not because the experience was bad – it wasn’t. It worked exactly as intended. I found a hotel, compared prices, booked it quickly, and moved on with my life.

But that was the point. I wasn’t hoping to be amazed. I wasn’t seeking delight. I was in task mode. I just wanted the process to work efficiently. That question felt off not because it was poorly worded, but because it revealed a deeper misunderstanding about how people actually experience value.

Many digital platforms – travel booking sites, airline apps, banking portals, insurance dashboards – are not emotional destinations. They are functional systems. Their primary job is to reduce effort, reduce uncertainty, and reduce time. When those systems work well, the dominant emotion isn’t delight. It’s relief. And relief is rarely measured.

Instead, many companies reach for aspirational language – delight, wow, magic – and then build surveys to validate those ideas. The problem is that when you ask emotional questions of a functional task, you don’t get insight. You get noise. Worse, you risk steering teams toward the wrong priorities: polishing moments that don’t matter while overlooking friction that does.

There’s a subtle but important difference between no emotion and no emotional work required. In many everyday buying contexts, people don’t want to be engaged – they want to be done. That’s not a failure of brand ambition; it’s an expression of buyer reality.

This is something I see repeatedly in my research. Emotion still matters, but it’s not always where companies expect it to show up. Often, the strongest positive signal isn’t excitement or delight, but quiet confidence that the system will do what it promises without getting in the way.

Sometimes, the best experience is the one you barely notice.

This pattern – and others like it – is a core theme in my upcoming book, Mind of the American Buyer, which looks at how people actually make decisions in the real world, rather than how brands imagine they do.

Curious where your customers are actually seeking delight – and where they just want things to work? You can reach me at info at bureauwest.com if you’d like to discuss the best way to understand that difference.

Posted on by Jay Zaltzman

Making research worth the investment

Most companies don’t ignore research on purpose. They invest in it with the hope that it will sharpen strategy and reduce uncertainty. Yet too often, research ends up as a report that sits on a shelf, while teams return to old habits or gut feel.

  • Back in the early 2000s, even a giant like Procter & Gamble was struggling with research not delivering the business results they expected. Their flagship Tide brand was a household name, but innovation success rates were low: only about 15% of new initiatives were meeting profit and revenue targets.

    P&G didn’t respond by simply commissioning more studies. They changed how they used research. They built what they called a “new-growth factory:” processes and teams designed not just to generate insights but to carry them through to product development, marketing, and strategy. They opened up to outside partners, created internal coaches to guide innovation projects, and developed toolkits to help different functions act on insights.

    The results were dramatic. Within about a decade, Tide’s revenues nearly doubled, helping its fabric and home-care division grow from roughly $12 billion to nearly $24 billion. In other words, they turned research into a driver of growth by investing in what happens after the data is collected.

Of course, not every company has the scale or resources of P&G. But the lesson applies far beyond consumer-goods giants: research produces the greatest returns when you budget for the “last mile,” when you tie findings to financial outcomes, and when you make insights easy for people across the company to use.

Here are three practices you can apply, no matter your company size:

  1. Budget for the “last mile”
    Most research budgets go toward data collection and analysis, with little left for embedding insights. That’s a missed opportunity. The last mile is where insights turn into action: facilitated workshops, action plans, internal roadshows, training sessions. Even setting aside 10% of your research budget for activation can make the difference between a report that sits on a shelf and insights that change strategy.

    Try this: For your next project, include a session where key stakeholders co-create an action plan from the findings. When people shape the plan themselves, they’re far more likely to follow through.
  2. Translate insights into financial implications
    Executives act when they see dollar signs. An insight like “customers are frustrated by onboarding” is interesting. But reframed as “if we reduce onboarding drop-off by 5%, we could gain $2 million in annual revenue,” it becomes actionable.

    Try this: For each major finding, sketch a quick “back-of-the-napkin” estimate of what acting on it could mean financially. It doesn’t have to be precise: directional numbers spark urgency and support.
  3. Design outputs for shareability
    The people who need to act on research often won’t read a 60-page report. But they will look at a one-page infographic, a short video, or a set of personas they can pin to their office wall. The more portable and shareable your insights are, the more they spread inside the organization.

    Try this: Ask yourself, “If someone only had 60 seconds with this finding, what would I want them to remember?” Build a summary or visual around that.

Research is an investment. But like P&G discovered, the return depends on how the findings are activated. Companies that budget for the last mile, tie insights to dollars, and make findings easy to share don’t just learn about their customers, they become more competitive.

Want to make sure your next research project leads to real impact? Let’s talk about how to get there. Contact me at info at bureauwest.com.

Posted on by Jay Zaltzman

How to avoid bias in research

One of the most important concerns we have as market researchers is how to minimize the influence researchers have on participants. We want to uncover participants’ real thoughts, feelings and motivations, but what if the researcher’s presence, or even the mere act of asking the question, has an impact on participants’ responses?

Experienced researchers have a variety of methods we use in qualitative research to reduce that impact and obtain the most accurate input possible. For example:

  • Setting the tone. The intro at the very beginning of the discussion is an important tool to minimize bias. The first thing I tell participants is “I’m an independent researcher. That means you can say good things or bad things and it won’t hurt my feelings either way. My job is to get people’s honest opinions.” (The late great Naomi Henderson advised against saying “there are no right or wrong answers,” since that brings up the idea of wrong answers. I agree!)
  • The intro is also the time to set the ground rules to avoid having one participant dominate the conversation, which can also introduce bias. I say “I want to hear from everyone and keep it even, so if you notice you’re going first a few times, I’m going to ask you to hold back and let someone else go first.” If a participant later starts to dominate the conversation, they can be reminded of this ground rule.
  • Neutral language. When our clients have questions, they tend to be unconsciously biased in favor of their product. For example, they may want to know how a certain feature has improved customers’ experience. Instead of asking questions like “how has this this feature improved your experience?” I prefer questions like “What impact, if any, did this feature have on your experience?”
  • One exception: when we want to make sure participants aren’t saying things to please us, we might play devil’s advocate to see how strongly they feel. For example, “Is that feature really that helpful? Someone was just saying in the last group that it made no difference to them. Were they wrong?” This gets participants to provide more detail about why they feel the way they feel.
  • Watching our own signals. The moderator can bias things without realizing by smiling or saying something like “great answer” to a participant. We really have to watch ourselves. I try to thank everyone for their input, say things like “that’s an interesting point” and “does anyone agree or disagree?” to make sure I appear neutral. And the first time someone disagrees with another participant, I’ll praise them and say something like “that’s what I was talking about earlier – we can feel free to disagree with each other in a friendly manner.”

While we can’t completely eliminate researcher influence, the above strategies can help a great deal. As third-party researchers, one benefit we bring to our clients is the fact that we come from the outside and are therefore more able to be neutral when conducting research. It’s important to approach research discussions with curiosity and empathy, rather than advance expectations about participants’ responses.

Let’s discuss how to elicit unbiased information from your customers and prospects. Email me at info at bureauwest.com.

Posted on by Jay Zaltzman

How to avoid unprofitable customers

Not all customers are profitable to a business. There are those who only ever buy products at a discount. There are customers who return products repeatedly. And those who utilize customer service disproportionately. (It turns out the customer isn’t always right!) Even though it goes against our instincts, there are customers that companies should not want – they should either be “fired” or, better yet, never become customers in the first place.

Some examples:

  • Years ago, Best Buy classified its customers as “angels” or “devils.” According to The Wall Street Journal, “The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts.” They changed their policies to make them less vulnerable to exploitation, adding a 15% restocking fee and selling restocked goods over the Internet instead of in-store.
  • Hubspot had two main customer segments: people who run small businesses (1-10 employees) whom they called “Ollie Owner,” and marketers at companies with 10-1000 employees (“Mary Marketer”). At a certain point, the company realized that the Mary Marketers were much more loyal and profitable then Ollie Owners. They didn’t “fire” their Ollie Owner customers, but rather, focused their marketing and service efforts on pleasing Mary Marketers.

How can your company avoid unprofitable customers?

  • Analyze existing data to identify and focus on customer groups that are likely to be profitable. Consider behavioral segmentation, looking at purchase recency, frequency and value, as well as customer lifetime value.
  • Approach discounting with care, looking for ways to incentivize good customers rather than encouraging unprofitable ones. One option: make discounts part of a loyalty program.
  • Develop personas for both profitable and unprofitable customers. Those “negative” personas can help guide marketing and product offerings, making sure you appeal to the good customers and not the unprofitable ones.
  • Pamper your high-value customers. Provide an amazing customer experience to your most profitable customers. Consider having explicit customer tiers like airlines do with frequent flyer status – those who are most profitable can unlock extra bonuses and services.
  • For some companies, it may make sense to screen customers and/or have minimum purchase levels.

Let’s discuss how to find your most profitable customers. Email me at info at bureauwest.com.

Sources: “Case study: how audience-driven products built a unicorn,” GTMonday, 3/4/24; “Best Buy hopes to exorcize devil patrons,” Ars Technica, 11/8/04

Posted on by Jay Zaltzman