"Marketing research is useless". This is the leitmotiv that regularly recurs in the specialised press, always with the same, never-ending examples, namely Henry Ford explaining that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have answered: "Faster horses".
And, of course, the open disinterest expressed by consumers in the 80s for a telephone that could be used to chat in the street; not forgetting Steve Jobs and the worldwide success of theiPhone !
And it's true: studies are ineffective in the case of breakthrough innovations, and we have to admit it: how do you get people to give their opinion on situations that seem totally improbable to them?
But breakthrough innovations can be counted on the fingers of one hand, as the following points out WikipediaWhile many companies are chasing after the market, there is a clear trend towards acceleration. " Killing application " - the brilliant invention that will revolutionise their market and "will kill all their competitors - we have to recognise that current activity is more in the field of incremental or simple improvement.
And here we need to adapt to consumer expectations: Nokia paid the price in the 2000s, when it refused to launch a flip phone - the famous " clamshell " - and being dethroned by Samsung The same thing happened a few years later, when the Finnish firm refused to listen to customers who had been seduced by the touch screen of theiPhone.
In the 90s, the designer Philippe Starck created for Thomson a superb remote control in the shape of a cone - a cult item still on sale on ebay; of course nobody dares to suggest testing the product's ergonomics.
The first users quickly complained: this new remote control didn't work! Starck had just forgotten that viewers naturally point the control towards the television set to change channels ... but his worked vertically - you had to hold it like an ice-cream cone - which wasn't really intuitive!
"76% of new product launches fail in their first year".according to Nielsen ; in many cases, marketing research would have prevented failure: because success depends as much on the skills of the R&D teams as on whether the final product meets the expectations of potential customers... and on good collaboration between technicians and marketers.
Finally, we can never be too wary of storytelling: when Ford joined Edison in the early 1890s, the motoring adventure had already been underway for two decades... and it's not clear that he had been commissioned to do anything... "faster horses".
