The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

The brands we like, and buy, and surround ourselves with have the profoundest possible things to say about who we are. As brands, our professional job titles are really no different. For example, over the years many people have come to me for job advice. Should they quit their job at the Fortune 100 company and launch a consultancy out of their home? Lost in all the talk about salary, benefits and commuting time are the emotional consequences of a job change, or the vulnerability the people are liable to feel once the logos on their business cards are gone. 

The fear of losing their “branded” identities is as good an explanation as any to me why CEOs and senior executives spend almost no time at all in their own stores or interact with the consumers who keep them in business by buying their razors, sodas, seafood, shirts, granola, frozen foods, perfumes and pharmaceuticals. Even executives who participate in focus groups observe the proceedings behind one-way mirrors, in air-conditioned rooms equipped with snacks, cold drinks, monitors and mute buttons. What they miss, again and again, are those moments when they might uncover something new and valuable about themselves or their brand. 

During my interactions with Tesco, the British multinational grocery retailer, the CEO introduced “Mission Feet on the Floor,” a program in which every executive was required to work on the floor of one of its grocery stores for several days at a time. To help them understand how Tesco’s food tasted compared to its rivals, executives were also invited to an offsite location and asked to prepare and cook all of Tesco’s premade sandwiches, salads and hamburgers, as well as the foods of their competitors.

In Colombia, I once consulted for a bank chain notorious for its slow customer service and long lines. I asked bank officials to pretend they were customers. It was an exercise in frustration, and even rage. Some executives waited up to an hour in line, while others were punted from teller to teller in order to secure a simple signature. When it was time to present my findings, I told the executive team that from now on we were implementing three new rules: No one should have to wait longer than three minutes for customer service; customers should be asked to sign a piece of paper only once; and there would always be a parking space available. A year later, it was the premier bank in South America for customer service. 

Bear in mind that none of these examples had much, if anything, to do with big data, which can only take us so far. After all, humans dissemble, consciously or unconsciously. Most of us aren’t aware of our habits and desires.

If companies want to understand consumers, big data offers a valuable, but incomplete, solution. I would argue that our contemporary preoccupation with digital data endangers high-quality insights and observations—and thus products and product solutions—and that for all the valuable insights big data provides, the Web remains a curated, idealized version of who we really are. Most illuminating to me is combining small data with big data by spending time in homes watching, listening, noticing and teasing out clues to what consumers really want. 

An unnamed banking institution failed to truly comprehend the behavior of its customers even after leveraging a big data analytics model designed to prevent customer “churn,” a term referring to customers who move money around, refinance their mortgages, or generally show signs they are on the verge of exiting the bank. Thanks to the analytics model, the bank soon found evidence of churn, and promptly drafted letters asking customers to reconsider. Before sending them out, though, the bank executive discovered something surprising. Yes, indeed, “big data” had seen evidence of churning. Thing is, it wasn’t because customers were dissatisfied with the bank or its customer service. No: most were getting a divorce, which explained why they were shifting around their assets.14 A parallel small data study could have figured this out in a day or less. 

As accurate, then, as big data can be while connecting millions of data points to generate correlations, big data is often compromised whenever humans act like, well, humans. As big data continues helping us cut corners and automate our lives, humans in turn will evolve simultaneously to address and pivot around the changes technology creates. Big data and small data are partners in a dance, a shared quest for balance. 

Read more about Small Data from bestselling author Martin Lindstrom, in his new book Small Data. 

For more weekend reads, follow our Weekend Essay channel.