Belief and Emotional Attachment in Innovation
As a researcher who studies consumers wants, needs and beliefs, the past year of national upheaval has been very interesting to observe. Whether it was politics, protests or mask wearing - the contradictive narratives were a good reminder that people’s internal belief systems and their emotional attachment to that knowledge is a primacy that must always be adhered to when developing new innovations.
On a recent NPR podcast about the upcoming COVID vaccine, Seth Godin opined on what it would take to get people to participate, but he first told a story about the decline in cigarette usage: Even though the negative health impact of cigarettes was known and communicated for decades, people only really stopped smoking when Hollywood finally made it less cool (and maybe a little bit because taxes increased and it became harder to purchase). Essentially, it took a generation to change people’s belief systems. Why didn’t consumers make a rational decision and avoid something that could cause cancer and hasten death? Because people tend to reject information that contradicts how they see themselves in the world. So if cigarettes were once “cool”, and someone started smoking to gain that emotional benefit, then hearing that cigarettes could kill you was likely a counterfactual to the core benefit they were initially seeking.
Friends of mine who are in different professional fields sometimes ask “how do you convince people to buy new products?”, and my typical response is “we don’t.” I’ll go on to describe how consumer research and new product innovation always starts with absorbing the life of your target, finding empathy for their needs and desires and then listening closely to how they perceive the world around them. Done correctly, it is easy to quickly come up with plenty of ideas around new products that might provide a tangible benefit and/or help them solve their problems. If done really well, it will also inherently align to their belief systems and can reinforce emotional perceptions of how they see themselves and the world around them.
Arguments about facts - whether it be it nutrition facts, or serving size, or what’s the right amount of a specific ingredient - can be a waste of time if a target audience has an inherent alternate belief. And presenting more facts to try and convince them of a new truth is not always the right path either. Once we choose to believe something we are all simply prioritizing that belief over something else, and so repeatedly communicating new information can be counter productive either if that person is not yet ready to change their belief system or if the new belief system comes with costs and risks.
Part of what makes our team at Mission Field so special is that we listen closely to our consumers and we find empathy for who they are and what they want from the world. All of our researchers will tell you that 4 ethnographies can often be more insightful than multiple decks of demand space planning or data analytics on the rise of certain sub categories - not because that information is not helpful, but because decks of data don’t provide insights into human truths of why a set of products is important to someone, what beliefs got them to that conclusion, and what emotional benefit do they derive from bringing those products into the home.