The customer’s not always right!
(via jonathan-deamer)“If I asked Henry Ford to interpret customer data, he would have been completely bloody useless at it.” - Long Suffering Researcher.
I loathe this quote. Let’s imagine for a second Henry Ford did ask a customer, and the customer said exactly that.
“Faster” is the consumer need here. “Horse” is their frame of reference - the insight is that they’re asking for a horse not, say, an already existing mode of high-speed transport like a train. So the big consumer opening is for a mode of transport that’s fast but also private, ownable and relatively cheap, like a horse. Guess what that turned out to be?
As innovation input, the customer feedback here isn’t useful, but only because that’s what Ford was developing anyway. As concept testing it would have been pretty good - suggesting there’d be a big market for such a thing.
Listening to your customers doesn’t mean taking everything they say at face value, y’know.
