Talking to yourself

At some point in every product launch, you get the sneaking suspicion that you’re talking to yourself. You’re not wrong. It’s a known “brain barrier”—the tendency to hear what you want, and it can stand between you and your company’s growth. In a classic McKinsey report, Hidden Flaws in Strategy, Charles Roxburgh outlines the 8 human biases that drive smart leaders to create flawed strategies.

1. Overconfidence
2. Mental Accounting
3. Status Quo bias
4. Anchoring
5. Sunk Cost effect
6. Herding instinct
7. Misestimating Future Hedonic States
8. False Consensus





















These play out in economics and marketing. In this post, I show how and where we see them stand in the way of sound marketing strategy. Most often, it’s False Consensus that leads us astray—the tendency to talk to yourself, rather than the customer and the market. So how do you combat it with real data?

The bias of false consensus
We hear what we want to, from customers, stakeholders, and prospects, because of our tendencies to:

• Confirm bias—seek out the facts that support our beliefs
• Selective recall
• Biased evaluation—quick acceptance of evidence that supports our belief, and rigorous evaluation and rejection of contradiction
• Groupthink, the pressure to agree in teams

In our work, we see product launches, branding and market positioning stall out or go off track due to false consensus. When you’re excited about a new technology or product, it’s hard to get out of your own head and avoid assumptions about what customers want.

Practical ways to get out of your own head and test your marketing hypothesis
This bias causes expensive product development and marketing missteps. In teams where you’re all excited about the project and its potential, it’s easy to talk to yourself.

So how do you get out of your own head and into that of the customer? There are ways even the smallest company can afford to test their theories:

1. Product previews. Early in product development, PLP Digital Systems previews the software to key customers gathered at an industry conference. Result? Early interest, and focus on the features that matter. Optimax uses a similar model in their annual customer summit. Why guess when you can ask?

2. Developer kits. Instead of presuming how customers will use their technology, the forward-thinking guys at New Scale Technologies supported their customers R&D efforts throughout the sale and support of their piezoelectric motor kit.

3. 1:1 customer interviews. In a 20-minute phone conversation, we'll learn where your customer sees value from your company and your product, business and tech trends in their business that impact what they'll expect from you, and why they buy. To avoid hearing what we want to hear, we always close with "what would you like me to know that I didn't ask?" Do a set of 8-10 interviews in each segment for validity.

4. Dual-purpose marketing and data collection. Digital ads like Google AdWords can give you real-time data on demand by industry, application, or geography. In helping an optics company create a new channel in Europe, we used an ad targeting Spain to test impressions and clicks against similar-sized countries where our customer already had a presence.

Any other test techniques you’ve tried? What surprised you?