What are customers thinking when they buy a product or service? What are they trying to do? What options are available to them? How do they choose? What motivates decision-making, and while we’re at it, what is a motivation anyway?
I’m currently developing a program with a client and we’re working on how best to describe how deep customer research is different from customer discovery interviews. If we don’t expect customers to be able to tell us directly what they want or what motivates them, then how do we expect to define the product or service offering that is right for them?
In looking for the best way to describe the squishy, intangible aspects of the process, I’m finding it useful to cut way back to the basics, to the etymology of the words themselves.
Since we are trying to derive a customer’s motivations in the context of the problem we intend our offering to solve, let’s start there.
Motivate likely has German roots and is defined as “an inner or social stimulus for an action.”
We know that there are many different motivational theories in the fields of economics and psychology. These provide abstracted frameworks that can be broadly generalized. For our purposes, we need to figure out which stimulus is most influential in determining how our offering will be perceived or experienced relative to our product category.
Influence has Medieval Latin roots meaning to “a flowing in” – and later used relative to people meaning “capacity for producing effects by insensible or invisible means”
Given that an influence may be “insensible or invisible” it’s no wonder people can’t describe it directly. So, what we are trying to do is figure out which motivations are exerting the strongest influence on our customer’s decision-making process relative to our product category.
Decision has Latin roots meaning to “cut off, determine, or come to resolution”
The customer needs to come to a resolution about which alternative(s) to cut off. When we ask a customer how a particular decision was made, the response is often a rational process. We know most decision processes are not entirely rational, so how do people know which alternatives to consider? How did they choose?
Choice has French roots meaning to “perceive, recognize, distinguish, or discern.”
It now becomes clear that we need to ensure that the customer will perceive our offering and recognize that it is worthy of consideration. This is where we get into the squishy, intangible zone. Perception is personal and/or cultural. How will we design the offering so that it can be easily distinguished from other alternatives and make it easy for the customer to discern its benefits, relative to how they perceive?
These are all the things that we need to learn from customer interviews, knowing that customers cannot give us direct answers to these questions. Most people are not aware of their motivations. But we can glean what they are by noticing contradictions. The rational decision process people talk about doesn’t always lead to the choices made.
This may not be obvious at first, but upon reflection and analysis of the interviews, it becomes apparent. It’s in examining these contradictions that we start to get a sense of the real underlying motivations that are driving behavior. If we design for these motivations, our final offering will be much more successful than if we design based on what people can tell us directly.
This is why deep customer interviews are different from asking people what they want or asking them to make a choice in an A/B test. And you’re not off the hook if your product is in an industrial, biotech, data, or other B2B category. If the buying decision is made by a human, you will do well to understand their underlying motivations. If the buying decision is automated, you will do well to understand the underlying motivations of the human who wrote the algorithm.
What have you experienced? How have you used motivations as a guide in your work?