What She Couldn't Notice
You've watched teams argue over button colors for weeks. The research comes back with sensible answers, but the result doesn't move. You suspect the real question is somewhere else entirely.
The button gives you something to settle. The doubt is harder to work with: are you learning about what matters, or getting better answers about what doesn't?
In 1996, P&G had a colorless, odorless spray that removed bad smells. Febreze worked. Getting people to buy it was proving harder.
Drake Stimson led the marketing. He was thirty-one and had spent five years on Wall Street, building models for choosing stocks. The team tested Febreze in Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Boise.
Charles Duhigg recounts their search in The Power of Habit. They needed to understand who would want the spray, and why. A park ranger in Phoenix seemed to give them an unusually clear answer.
An answer worth believing
The ranger trapped animals for work and often got sprayed by skunks. Everything she owned smelled of skunk. Febreze removed the smell.
She cried as she told the team about it. "This spray has changed my life."
That was real relief from a real problem. The team built their advertising around it: a jacket after a smoky restaurant, a dog named Sophie on the couch. Febreze would save people from embarrassing smells.
The ads aired in the test cities in 1996. Sales started small and got smaller.
The team had listened to someone who needed the product. Why weren't other people with bad smells buying it?
A visit to a home outside Phoenix exposed the problem. The woman who lived there had nine cats. Her house was clean and organized, but one of the visitors gagged.
The woman said the smell usually wasn't a problem.
"Do you smell it now?"
"No."
That answer kept turning up in dozens of smelly homes. People couldn't detect the bad smells they lived with. The smell that was supposed to remind them to use Febreze had stopped registering.
The ranger's need was clear to her. That made her persuasive, but it also made her different from the people the team needed to reach.
They had expected her answer to explain too many other people.
After the bed was made
Another woman lived near Scottsdale. She was in her forties, had four children, and had neither pets nor smokers at home. She used Febreze every day.
"I don't really use it for specific smells," she told them.
That answer offered little help to a team selling odor removal. But they stayed and watched her clean.
She made the bed. Then she sprayed the comforter.
"Spraying feels like a little mini-celebration when I'm done with a room."
The order mattered. She wasn't reaching for the bottle because something smelled bad. She reached for it after the work was done.
P&G went back through its own tapes of people cleaning. The tapes showed the same small moment of satisfaction at the end. The Scottsdale woman's spray belonged to that moment.
That's what going to where the customer is makes possible. Thinking harder about odor removal would still have left the team thinking about odor removal. Watching her make the bed gave them something else to understand.
P&G added perfume to Febreze and showed freshly made beds in the advertising. "Gets bad smells out of fabrics" became "Cleans life's smells."
The relaunch came in summer 1998. Sales doubled within two months and reached $230 million within a year.
The formula changed, too. What the team saw changed the product as well as the way they described it.
Stimson later said, "No one craves scentlessness."
The ranger had wanted relief. The woman near Scottsdale wanted the feeling that followed a finished room.
What a better question can miss
Does that mean we should stop asking customers?
Better questions can help. The Scottsdale woman answered honestly, and asking was how the team found her.
Her words mattered. They just became more useful once the team followed her into the bedroom.
Nor was entering a customer's home enough by itself. They had already done that with the ranger. Her experience was true, but it didn't explain the homes where the smell went unnoticed.
I think of that limit as the Research Ceiling. A survey can reach the sensible layer: the answer someone can give when asked. What has become ordinary may never enter the answer.
The quiet can hide an attachment as well as a problem.
In January 2009, Tropicana replaced the orange with a straw on its carton with a glass of juice. Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America, had said people "have not necessarily had a huge connection" to the old image.
Unit sales fell 20% between January 1 and February 22. PepsiCo brought the old carton back.
Campbell said, "That wasn't something that came out in the research."
That doesn't tell me which question would have caught it. It does make me wary of treating research that comes back clean as proof that the work will hold up.
The research tells me about what it examined. Customers still live with things it may never have brought into view.
I keep coming back to the house with nine cats.
"Do you smell it now?"
"No."
She couldn't tell them what she could no longer notice.
I write down what turns up when I watch instead of ask.
Part of The Perception Engine