When I was a kid, one year my parents took my siblings and I on vacation on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It was a fantastic alternative to the cold, Indiana winter; instead of spending that Christmas break trudging through snow, I was fighting sunburns on the beach. The trip was nearly perfect, sunny weather, warm temperatures, blue ocean, miles of beach… but something unexpected happened on the last full day of our trip.

That morning, my parents fought the bittersweetness of a final day of vacation by renting a small speedboat that we could enjoy in the salty Gulf. We’d rented it for the day, and we were all looking forward to exploring the length of the beach and jumping the waves in our quick little craft. However, within the first hour of leaving shore, I noticed a thick, low cloud on the horizon. It didn’t mean anything to my parents or me at first, we just kept cruising. Quickly, the cloud crept closer and closer. My parent’s saw the danger before the kids did, and not two hours after we’d left the shore, we were racing the cloud back to where we’d started. The race finished in a tie, and we docked our boat just as the thickest fog I’ve ever experienced enveloped us. Fortunately, we made it off the water before we became lost, but the fog was so thick, it made driving in an unfamiliar area (before GPS mind you) essentially impossible. Our entire vacation came to a close early, because we were stuck in the fog.

I realized that morning’s fog wasn’t the only time my excitement, momentum, and passion disappeared in a cloudy mist.

You know what you want to do, where you want to go, who you want to be, but then the fog rolls in. And you’re lacking the direction you need to move.

You’ve got an idea that you’re dying to execute, but then the fog rolls in. And you’re buried in day-to-day minutia.

You’ve been given license to be creative, break the rules, and stretch the limits, but then the fog rolls in. And you can’t come up with a single idea.

Are you stuck in the fog?

Extra Credit Question: How do you plan to get out?

We spend a lot of time with consumers in their home watching them interact with products and asking them questions about their likes & dislikes. One thing that never fails to amaze me is the disconnect between what people are buying and what companies are selling.

Some rounds of golf are fun.  Other rounds of golf are best described as “learning experiences”.  I typically don’t blog about fun rounds of golf, so you can probably intuit what’s coming next.

For this particular “learning experience”, I hadn’t really played for months, so I was pretty rusty (not that I never get really… “un-rusty, at least at golf).  A friend and I were paired up with another twosome for our round. They seemed nice enough; members of the club where we were playing.

The first few holes went okay. The other twosome was playing much better than we were, unsurprisingly. By the time we got to the 6th hole, my game fell apart. I suddenly looked like I had never swung a club before. I’ve come to expect this from my game, but I did notice something that really surprised me. On the same hole, the other three players all crumbled as well. As a group we put 6 balls in the lake, topped numerous shots and almost hit each other twice. One guy from the other group quit about half-way to the hole saying he’d never played so badly…

It appeared that my collapse spread as broadly and quickly as a virus. By the end of that hole, our group had suddenly conformed to a strict dynamic of poor play. Inexplicably, my poor play (and perhaps my frustrated demeanor) seemed to be holding the others back from their true potential.

Group dynamics are real, and are extremely hard to compensate for. In golf, a given foursome may rise to the skill level of the top players or wallow in the futility of the group’s worst player. It’s true for other situations as well (although skill is often replaced by optimism/pessimism). I’m not sure what causes this, but I’ve seen this dynamic proved true in meetings, projects, games, and even simple group conversations.

This same trend is true when trying to really understand consumers. Talk to them one at a time in their natural environment, and you’re likely to see the real person complete with desires, pains, realities and fantasies. Bring them into a group and talk to them all at once, and they will inevitably begin “swimming in the same school” of thought. Most of us are hyperaware of group dynamics when it comes to pessimistic feedback (person A affected others in the group too much, so the feedback is invalid), but we are all too willing to forget about groupthink when we’re hearing something we like. It’s human nature: humans in groups think and act as a single unit, not as a collection of independent, unique minds.

If you’re seeking consumer understanding, be intentional about what kind of information you’re trying to gather and how you’re trying to gather it.  If you’re looking to find out how a group of people will react to something, studying people in groups is perfect.  However, if you’re looking to discover how individuals think, act, or live, you’re fooling yourself if you think a focus group or other group study will provide you accurate understanding.

Have you had success/frustrations using groups to understand consumers?

Have you ever noticed that even when companies desire change, their actual efforts cause them to remain where they are?

A friend of mine is in the consumer durables segment, but was talking to an executive at a healthcare company. The executive recognized a skill-set in my friend that his company was lacking. So he encouraged him to send in a resume.  My friend did just that, but somehow the resume was intercepted by Human Resources, who proceeded to tell him that they are not interested because he has… you guessed it; “no experience in the health care industry.”