But somewhere along the way, the issue has become muddled. Understanding consumers has far too often been reduced to identifying ‘needs’, and market research has become a kind of dreaded hurdle that must be leaped before you go on to the next phase of development. Or in the worst cases, “validating needs” is a screen that has grown so finely meshed that nothing but absolute mediocrity passes through it.

I think that the current balance of power between the ways in which companies think about consumers and products on the one hand, and the tools that they use to do so (current conceptions and models of research) on the other, are in a sort of deadlock. There is a kind of tyranny emerging where consumers’ needs, opinions, and preferences have become a constraining, limiting force in the dialogue between producer and consumer. Paying attention to people is a good thing. Having your customers seem like a limit on your ability to move in the market is not.

I want to talk today about the value of what might be called “answers of uncertainty.” Things you find out that result in someone saying “maybe it’s…” or “it could be that…” or “what might happen if.” An understanding of consumers that results in stories of possibility rather than in the reduction of risk, the elimination of uncertainty, or the ‘validation’ of paths already taken.

To do that, requires a step or two back in order to examine some presumptions and to lay some new groundwork for thinking about what questions to ask, and what answers to expect when you ask them.

Part I. We build, therefore we are: “Social Construction” theory bits and pieces:
This way of thinking has its basis in an area of social thinking loosely termed “social construction” – an approach to thinking about those gaps between the individual and the social, between the psychological and the cultural. It is an area in which you find anthropology, psychology, sociology, and culture theory all grappling with the ways in which their theories and their disciplines talk to one another. I’m going to build a bit of this story from some of the key concepts in this area – or at least my peculiar take on them

1. Not just “needs.” In market research and in much of business, there is a widespread presumption that people are motivated by needs, drives, desires. The easy accessibility of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” has made for a simplistic psychologizing of the world, and the notion that if we can identify the need, we’ll satisfy the person. I think that there is only one “need” that is of any consequence: the need to make meaning, and through that, to be a particular person, to have an identity. Every day, being yourself is work. That we do this work – and aren’t simply driven by mysterious internal forces – is the essence of the idea of the social construction of reality. (getting dressed)

2. Active construction. This is the most important shift of the constructivist position. The work that we all do is constant and lifelong. We do not reach some full expression of an inner self by the age of 12, or 21 or even 65. Continuity and coherence are important elements of identity, but that does not imply stasis. Think of how difficult it is to maintain the position of a boat in tidal waters, across seasons and storms and the waxing and waning of the moon – that is the work we do to be who we are in the context of the world around us. It is imperative that we imagine people not simply as bodies animated by needs, but as adaptive and self-defining systems, complex and rarely stable.

3. Presuming an audience , or ‘objects’ in the grammatical sense. This is the second really important shift to keep in mind. We, as actors, presume not a passive audience, but other players. Our understanding of, anticipation of reaction and reception are every bit as important as our intention. “All the world’s a stage,”

4. Tools: all of this construction work requires tools. Things to think with, things to express with. Things to use. Props, even. Tools are both opportunity and constraint. Our ability to create a world, express a self, act a part does not and can not come entirely from within ourselves. In the same way that an artist uses material (both of the physical and the conceptual variety) we use words, clothes, technology, stuff to construct and present ourselves to everyone else. Again, the important thing here is that this is a dialogical process: we (as consumers) use the tools that are available, while at the same time we (as producers, designers, builders) make new tools. (Cell phone “where are you?” as an example. )

The “social” in social construction.

5. Roles. Social systems only work because we act within (mostly) their constraints. One of the most central of these constraints is the idea of a role. I’m just as clear on the role of “speaker” right now as I will be when I return to being part of the “audience” in a few minutes. But were I to confuse the two – if I were to just sit here expecting all of you to speak to me—we’d all know that something was wrong. The important aspect of the notion of roles for this discussion though are two key facts: 1) roles are not just for individuals; and 2) roles are defined as they are enacted – in playing it, you elaborate it, change it, bring new character and possibility to it, and those who see you do that have their idea of the role changed forever. And so it goes.

A bit more on the key ideas here:. Roles are played by institutions as well as individuals. Which is where it gets interesting for businesses. Your company, your brand, your products are what social scientists call “interlocutors” – those with whom we have a dialogue, a conversation. And a conversation is not a conversation if it is one sided. In the simplest case, a teenager engages the ‘back to school’ displays at retail as as much a part of the “who am I?” dialogue as her friends, her school, her family. But a company like e-bay makes possible entirely new communities, businesses, ways of finding and doing and being. e-bay didn’t come from “needs.”

Who defines what’s possible to do with something that we use? It is as much the people and the organizations who design it, make it, sell it, and change it as it is the people who use it. And what’s more, consumers expect that kind of evolution and participation. It’s hard work to be a mom, a student, a professional, or a snowboarder. It is impossible for someone to be any of these things without the rules and the tools that the social structure provides. From fashion to language to modes of work to entertainment to meals, use and expectation are constantly informing one another, constantly suggesting to people that there is another way to do something.

The personal computer, the walkman, the automated teller machine and drive-thru breakfast are just a few of the things that were launched into the world proactively, without a base of “needs” to justify them. And yet they have changed everyday life, have profoundly altered the set of expectations we share and the way in which we create the tales we tell about ourselves, to ourselves. The organizations that launch products and services like these have perhaps more impact on social life than those things we think of as social institutions such as schools, governments, or religions.

System-scaled interdependency: Here’s the last bit on this: the necessity of considering things ‘in context’ – an object in a context of use, individuals in the context of an institution, a company in the context of a competitive space, whatever level we might choose to focus on — is a corollary of the social construction position. But this very quickly gets us to one of the principal reasons we need to not only accept, but to embrace uncertainty. Very simple systems are predictable and stable. And systems that have a major element which is unvarying (at least on human scale) are also more stable. Gravity, for instance, is pretty constant. And the earth and the moon have found themselves a pretty stable way of relating to one another.

But let me take a couple of seemingly simple objects that are part of our everyday experience (coffee pot, stapler, book) and ask you a few simple questions: “What is this?” “What is it for” “How is it that you know you know that?” It doesn’t take a great deal of reflection to realize how many socially constructed, dynamic systems are involved in the perception of something as simple as these seem to be. Imagine the effect on the ocean tides if not only there were say, 100 moons around earth, but each of the moons was constantly deciding what its orbit should be and arguing with the other moons about who should be in which orbit! In other words, prediction isn’t made difficult simply because these systems are large and complex (though they are), prediction presumes a kind of stablilty that I think just isn’t there.

II. Part Two – Stability is not an option (which is really good )

Okay. Why not? And why is this a good thing?

1. I think that what I’ve described above might best be characterized, somewhat paradoxically, as a “robust unstable system” By which I mean simply that how it works keeps changing, but that it works does not. And again, I think that the key here is the two-sided nature of the making of meaning. People being (creating, discovering, inventing) themselves, doing the work of being father, student, executive, manager, plumber or vacationer do not create these roles from nothing. We use and act within, as Max Weber famously put it, “webs of significance which we ourselves have spun.”

2. If it weren’t for human nature, this would all settle back down to a nice equilibrium state, and the ‘web’ would be pervasive, stable, and predictable. But that isn’t likely to happen. Not only do the actors in this system have the ability to change the rules, but there are any number of very nice models and theories which show us why human beings will always be inclined to change. These range from the compelling work of Csikszentmihalyi on the dynamics of optimal experience (whose absence we experience as either boredom or anxiety), to the effect on cognitive development of complex tools – a kind of empirical proof of the “shoulders of giants” insight of Newton’s, to social theory that examines how technology and social complexity are affecting the way we experience such fundamental things as time and space.

3. It seems that people have not just a quirky interest in change for the sake of change, but a profound, adaptive use for it. To really show how human and how important the role of difference, change, development, and complexity are is a long and complicated argument to make, which I don’t really have the time or space to do here — but in many ways, it isn’t the most important part of this argument. All I’m trying to do is give you some of the evidence, some of the range of ways in which it seems clear that the ‘consumer’ side of the dialogue I’m talking about is deeply predisposed to look for new ways of doing things.

4. I don’t think that this reduces to a sense of novelty, of simply marking something up as ‘new and improved.’ We’re all too busy for that. The places where change is most valued and valuable are in the places where people are trying to do the work of being who they are. These are the stories that we are all constantly in the process of telling about ourselves – to ourselves, our closest friends and family, our peers, and to neighbors and passers by and to the larger world.

5. This is where the other side of the dialogue comes into play. You can’t just put a new tool into someone’s hand and say, “Here, use this.” You have to tell them what to use it for, or at the very least, say, “Here, use this.” when the context will help to make the possibilities clear.

6. Just because one gets bored when things don’t change, when skills outstrip the challenges of the situation, doesn’t mean that one knows how to change the situation. As individuals, we look for two things: a suggestion of what’s possible, and someone we trust and have confidence in to make that suggestion.

7. And here’s the nice part: I think that brands have increasingly become one of the most important places where people look for those suggestions about what might be, and good brands, great brands, are the ones where people trust that the brand knows the complexities of the situation better than they do. The social theorist I mentioned above (Anthony Giddens) has argued that more and more elements of our daily life are based upon abstract systems which we only touch through some sort of technical intermediary (the airplane and the watch examples).

8. You wouldn’t buy a new car from bob & fred’s car company, would you? Not without a lot of work. But BMW can successfully deploy ‘adaptive technologies’ –such as cruise control that adjusts to the density of traffic around the vehicle that average folks like me have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER how it might work. Brands are things we trust not in a blind faith kind of way, but in the same way that we might use a map to find our way through new territory.

9. I’d like you to indulge me in one more little bit of theory. I like it because it is both simple, seemingly obvious, and at the same time, subversive. In the 1960’s, the expatriate Marxist critic Herbert Marcuse wrote a slim volume called “the aesthetic dimension” whose central proposition was that art is always subversive of the dominant order because representation always puts the current system “in play” to a degree, that the social dialectic is always being driven forward by imagination. In other words, by representing anything other than the current reality, the artist flashes a huge neon sign in front of his audience that says “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!” (McDonald’s Drive-thru breakfast as a case example)

10. People are using the things you make, you sell, to tell stories to one another about who they are. But in that telling, they get other ideas, they discover new things to be, new ways to be who they are.

11. And on the other hand, they are looking for ways to make those stories new, better, more compelling.. And who do they look to for that? In some measure, they look to the organizations that build the things of their world, the makers of the elements from which they construct their world and the meaning of their world. And they are, in this dynamic, willing participants in a dialogue, though never simple, passive recipients of ‘messages.’ And this is why we need to understand them, their frames of reference, their language. If you want to tell them a story about how things could be, about how they could be, you need to know how they see the world.

III. Definitely finding uncertainty

1. So that is the role of research in all of this. I promised that I’d finally get around to it. If you understand your customers in this very active way, and understand as well that you are – witting or no – their partner in the building of the stories of their lives, then the role of research changes.

This is not the research that tells you what to do or tells you what they need. But research that asks & understands the way they are making meaning will open up lots of areas where things are shaky and unknown, and unclear. In other words, it will help to find the places where people are looking for someone they trust to suggest some ways in which they might subvert the current reality. Escape some boredom, control an abstraction, tell a new story.