The Hidden Power of Mundane Ideas

Picture this: a nutrition scientist does a study with one person, limiting him to a 1500 calorie diet and having him run for 15 minutes on a treadmill each day. The man loses three pounds in a month. Can we safely assume that this experiment, when repeated with others, will produce the exact same result?

Of course not. So many factors — not the least of which include testing a larger, more diverse sample of people — contribute to the accuracy of any study.

The same holds true for consumer focus groups, innovation contests, and more recently the use of social media sites to solicit feedback from consumers. There's an unfair expectation that at the end of a survey or a campaign, we'll get "the answer" to something big from one magic interaction. Maybe we'll get the winning creative for a multi million-dollar ad campaign in a crowdsourced competition. Or the idea for our next product will hit like a lightning bolt on our Facebook wall, straight from the minds of one of our most loyal fans.

Sometimes we're lucky enough to get an amazing idea from an individual that changes everything, but more often than not, we're getting a collection of kind-of-similar, not-too-flashy ideas that should force us to question what we're doing (and find a way to do it better.) One of our mentors, Professor Laura Kornish from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has studied online consumer interactions with brands, like MyStarbucksIdea (a kind of online suggestion box for coffee fanatics). Her verdict: Sometimes it's far more valuable to find patterns in what people are requesting than to find that one, big "I never thought of that" idea.

Here's a slightly different example of this phenomenon in action. A large consumer electronics manufacturer we recently worked with had launched a new hybrid TV and internet technology focused on teens. They'd certainly done their homework. The company interviewed teens in focus groups before launching the product to find out which features to include in their new internet-enabled TV. The TV included many of the teens' suggestions, but didn't catch on in the mass market. Why not?

Building features based on direct feedback was certainly cool, but assumed a basic level of knowledge about teens that the brand hadn't yet mastered. We worked with a group of teens online with the goal of finding out how (if at all) teens see their TV and internet usage intersect. By far, this was the most popular recurring sentiment of the more than 2,400 submissions:

I often watch TV on my computer, but don't really want to browse the internet on my TV. These and a few of the other popular sentiments seemed so obvious, but were being overlooked by the brand in efforts to build the next innovative product. Sometimes, products are far ahead of their time because they assume a level of comfort that isn't yet there in the consumer. That's where the insights of the collective can be used to help us question everything. Maybe we don't need to surf Facebook on TV at all, but need to find a way for the big screen to interact seamlessly with the other four devices kids are using while they watch TV.

The same awareness of repeated customer sentiments applies to nearly any business. Sometimes changes can be obvious (a small restaurant gets 35 comment cards requesting a dessert menu, so they hire a pastry chef). Most of the time, we need to force ourselves to ask the right questions and brace ourselves for a thorough analysis of the mundane. That's often where the real innovation lies.