Article by ICG member Oliver Waterstone, Eightball Insights
Synthetic data sure looks seductive if you’re a harassed, time-pressed CMO. It’s fast. It’s cheap. It looks close-enough to the real thing.
Close enough to get your vision over the line with tricky stakeholders, which is what you need ultimately, right?
And yes, AI is great at giving you quick reads as a starting point. No question.
But let’s not call it research. Or we risk devaluing the word and opening the door to brands slowly, surely reducing their exposure to reality.
In the months and years ahead, I think we’ll see what happens to the brands that go down this easy road.
They’ll become the Pepsis and Jaguars of the new era – brands that went in stunningly solipsistic directions because they drank too greedily from the Kool Aid of hubris and stopped inviting outside voices into their decision making.
I wanted to share a real life example of a true insight – a striking reframe that helped solve a business problem and changed the course of a brand – that could only have come from talking to real people.
I’ve never forgotten it, and ultimately it led to my decision to switch from being an agency strategist to running my own strategic research consultancy.
(Full disclosure – I recently posted this story in the comments section of a post by the excellent Zoe Scaman.)
I was a strategist on Waitrose during the financial crisis.
The brand had been experiencing double digit growth up until 2008, after which sales just tanked.
The data was telling us that shoppers were leaving us for Aldi and Lidl, but it didn’t square with what we thought we knew of the ‘Waitrose shopper’.
So we ran some focus groups and an anecdote emerged that became the reframe of the problem that the business needed to get its sh-t together.
A lady told the group how she still shopped at Waitrose, but when she got back home to unload her shopping from the car, she moved all the shopping into Aldi bags so her neighbours didn’t think she was a mug for paying over the odds.
That single anecdote was probably the most important factor in getting the Waitrose Essentials range greenlit.
Synthetic data doesn’t feel shame. Synthetic data has no neighbours.
If we’d run synthetic groups around this problem, I guarantee you it would have confirmed our biases.
We’d have patted ourselves on the back that we’d ‘done research’ on it.
And then we’d have proceeded to come up with the wrong solution to the wrong problem, blissfully confident in our wrong-ness in the way that AI notoriously is.
Waitrose Essentials turned around Waitrose’s fortunes during the financial crisis and its aftermath, reaching its highest ever market share of 4.8% by 2012, three years after launch.
Who knows where it would be without that lady’s sense of shame and her nosy neighbours.
(5) Oliver Waterstone | LinkedIn