We all know the famous quote that Henry Ford may or may not have ever said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s mainly used as a defense for those who claim that research is not essential for disruptive innovation. It’s true, surveying a group of people probably isn’t the best way to come up with a groundbreaking idea, but dismissing all consumers for their ability to provide valuable input seems a bit too extreme.
Despite what Ford thought, the key to what his consumers would have wanted does, in fact, lie in their would-have-been request for faster horses. While consumers may not have had the capacity to identify a technology that did not exist yet, they did articulate their ultimate need. Which, with the request for a faster horse is clear: to save time and get to their destination more efficiently.
When conducting research, it’s not the respondent’s job to come up with the million dollar idea, it’s the respondent’s job to confirm or denounce the need for the million dollar idea, and why the current marketplace is or is not sufficient in meeting those needs. It’s on the researcher to do the rest of the work which includes:
Asking better questions
I have a hard time believing that if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, he wouldn’t have also asked some follow-up questions. If they told him they wanted a faster horse, he wouldn’t have thrown out his designs for an automobile after one quick question and moved on to figuring out how to genetically enhance a horse to make it go faster. I don’t know Henry Ford, but I can say that with certainty.
The questions we ask and the way we ask them are crucial to the response we receive. How you ask is everything. If a question has intrinsic biases or is leading in any way, it won’t provide a genuine response. If you ask too few questions, you run the risk of not getting to the root of the matter. If you ask too many, you run the risk of respondent fatigue and lazy answers.
That makes survey writing sound exhausting, but as the saying goes, ‘work smarter, not harder’ — craft intelligent, well thought out questions that address all aspects of the problem instead of a laundry list of half-baked, lazy ones.
Looking underneath the answers
People can’t always express what they want. But if you ask the right questions and look closely at the responses they provide, you can likely get at the underlying motivation behind why they say they want something. If Ford asked people what they wanted and half said faster horses and the other half said stronger whips to hit the horses with, what both groups are essentially looking for is the same thing. Knowing that the ultimate goal was to build a car anyway, Ford’s innovation would have been validated by these responses that express a need for a faster mode of transportation.
Being willing to listen
This last piece is the most important. So often, survey research is conducted to validate a hypothesis. When the results don’t tell the ideal story, data points are cherry-picked or the research is dismissed entirely (speaking from experience) because far too much has already been invested in the idea. This is where human subjectivity, emotion, and politics often comes into play, even when the solution that would be more effective in the long run is to go back to the drawing board and iterate on a product or feature to better align with a market need.
Research should by no means be held as gospel, but when performed correctly, it provides a strong indication of where the market lies in relation to your innovation. Sometimes taking two steps back to reevaluate can ultimately propel you ten steps forward to that next big innovation.
