Ordinary Advertising

It’s always gratifying to see my point of view on an issue appear in another book written by someone I really respect. Especially when that someone is Malcolm Gladwell and the book, Blink, is likely to get a readership about 1,000 times greater than my own.

The specific chapter that caught my eye is entitled: “Kenna’s Dilemma: The Right–And Wrong–Way To Ask People What They Want. And what you have here is a writer with no vested interest in the creation of extraordinary advertising whastsoever calling into question the exact same market research approaches that I (and many others) have such big problems with.

Kenna, it turns out, is a musician whose work ran afoul of some focus groups, which were conducted because, as Mr. Gladwell tells it:

“The people who make movies or detergent or cars or music all want to know what we think of their products. That’s why it wasn’t enough for the people in the music business who loved Kenna to act on their gut feelings. Gut feelings about what the public wants are too mysterious and too iffy. Kenna was sent to market researchers because it seems as though the most accurate way to find out how consumers feel about something is to ask them directly.”

Sound familiar? It should since that’s the fate that awaits most new advertising approaches on any given day, depite the fact it doesn’t work too well. For reasons Mr. Gladwell goes on to cite:

“Vic Braden (a psychologist referenced earlier in Blink) discovered that while people are very willing and very good at volunteering information explaining their actions, these explanations, particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious, aren’t necessarily correct. In fact, it sometimes feels as if they’re just plucked out of then air…Finding out what people think of a rock song sounds as if it should be easy. But the truth is that it sin’t, and the people who run focus groups and opinion polls haven’t always been sensitive to this fact.”

“Haven’t always”? How about ever? I know I’ve been accused of being to hard on focus groups and market research, but I’m really not. I’m all for anything that increases our understanding of the people we’re trying to communicate with. And totally opposed to any research that purports to be able to identify the best idea. Research that replaces gut instincts with data points. Or research used, as David Ogilvy once put it, “the way a drunkard uses a lamp post–for support instead of illumination.”

After the Kenna story Mr. Gladwell goes on to tell the story of Herman Miller’s Aeron chair, which in a nutshell goes like this: if it had been left to conventional research to determine its fate, it would have died an early death. Or as he puts it:

“…the people reporting their first impressions misinterpreted their own feelings. They said they hated it. But what they really meant was the chair was so new and unusual that they weren’t used to it.”

“New”, “unusual”…dare I add “original”, “different” or “extraordinary” to this litany? That’s the fundamental problem with using conventional testing to evaluate advertising ideas. It runs the enormous risk of ruling out all but the ordinary. Or as my new best friend, Mr. Gladwell states:

“The problem with market research is that often it is too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.”

So thank you, Mr. Gladwell for writing another book every bit as good as The Tipping Point and one that’s even more relevent to the subject of developing extraordinary advertising. Do I think as a result many clients will change their ways? No. But a few might and that could gradually convince the entire advertising community when it comes to choosing the most extraordinary advertising, there is no safety in (research) numbers.