Market research lessons from the wild

It is difficult to ask consumers to predict what they will do in the future. Well, you can ask. But you won’t necessarily receive an accurate answer, especially when people don’t have any context for predicting that future.

Asking, “Who will you vote for in next month’s election?” or “Will you fly to Hong Kong this weekend?”?are questions that generate very accurate responses because we have frameworks for thinking about those issues.?

However, asking about something less familiar and less tangible like, “Will you purchase this new technology when it hits the market” is much harder to answer because our ultimate decision is based on contextual factors that are hard to predict – such as how that brand is marketed or whether friends or peers use the product.

My friend Nancy Cox sent me a New York Times article about how this can apply even in the animal kingdom. In most of the world, lions seldom climb trees. However, in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda and Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania, they do.

The habit of tree-climbing is contextual. In the 1960s, swarms of flies began biting lions in Tanzania. The only escape was up a tree.?Once they began, they never stopped.?Similarly, at Queen Elizabeth National Park, the lions live in uniquely small prides; they began climbing trees as the only way to avoid being trampled by stampeding buffaloes.

As one researcher said, “Generation after generation, it really has become a habit to go up in the trees. It just gets entrenched as a culture because it is fun.”

If you were to have interviewed the distant forebears of these lions, they surely would have told you, “Pshaw! I would never climb a tree.?Nor will my offspring ever climb a tree.”?But, like us, they couldn’t have predicted how context was to shape the future.