Millennium Marketing Research®

Tom Schori DBA Millennium Marketing Research®, 808 Ironwood, Normal IL 61761, 309-532-8466

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Headed in the wrong direction? Stop and turn around!

By Thomas R. Schori, Ph.D., and Michael L. Garee, Principals,  Millennium Marketing Research, 808 E. Ironwood, Normal, IL 61761-5239. Tel. 309-532-8466 -

Imagine this. You plan a car trip from St. Louis, MO, to Los Angeles, CA. You determine that the best way to get there is to take Interstate 70 West all the way to Utah, where you’ll then jump on Interstate 15 into Los Angeles.

Once underway, you expect to be in Kansas City, MO, within an hour or two, but lo and behold, in two hours you see that you’re crossing the Indiana state line, headed for Indianapolis! Much to your chagrin you realize that you have been on Interstate 70 East instead of West! You’re headed in the wrong direction!

In this example, of course, virtually anyone would stop, turn around and head West on Interstate 70, once they realized they were going in the wrong direction. Indeed, who in their right mind would conclude that they already have too much time and energy committed to the journey to stop and turn around, in order to get headed in the right direction? Yet that’s precisely what happens all the time in the business world. People commit to a "direction" or some course of action, and even if the evidence becomes overwhelming that they’ve taken the "wrong road," they refuse to "turn around" because they’ve already committed so much time and energy to an action or position!

Over many years in business we’ve seen this phenomenon surface numerous times, and probably you have as well. Some company officer or other "mucky-muck" gets an idea in his or her head that such and such is a "fact" about a product or service the company offers. They may even have "evidence" in various research to support their belief, but certainly that isn’t necessary.

Then, along comes some rather thorough research that makes it unmistakably clear that such and such certainly is not a "fact" about the product or service, as is believed by the company officer or other "mucky-muck." What are the chances that this higher-up will objectively review this new research and even consider changing his or her mind in the face of this new evidence? Somewhere between nil and extremely unlikely, we contend.

Let us cite a recent example of this phenomenon. Recently, we were asked by a large consumer product company to test the relative importance to members of their target market of 20 distinct product characteristics. Each of these characteristics was known to be important to consumers when selecting this particular product.

In order to determine relative importance of the 20 characteristics we asked survey respondents to assign a total of 20 points among all the characteristics. That is, if respondents believed that just one characteristic far outweighed the other 19 in importance, then he or she could assign all 20 points to that one characteristic. Or, if the respondent believed all 20 characteristics were of equal importance, then he or she could assign one point to each of the 20 characteristics. The point being, the 20 points could be assigned among the 20 characteristics in any fashion deemed appropriate by the respondent.

Over the years, we have used this approach to measure relative importance of product or service characteristics many times. As a result, we have a great deal of confidence in the consumer’s ability to make very fine distinctions among any given set of characteristics. Experience has shown, for example, that the average importance score of the characteristic deemed most important by survey respondents is normally many, many times greater than the characteristic deemed least important.

In this particular study, the most important characteristic was shown to be over 50 times more important to consumers than the least important characteristic. Let’s say that the most important characteristic was "organically grown" and the least important characteristic was "shape of container."

When we made the presentation of the research findings to the client company, we learned from one of the company officers in attendance that the company currently had a large-scale project underway to redesign the container because earlier research had shown consumers reacted negatively to the shape of it. Based on our more current findings, obtained from a representative sample of real life current and prospective customers for the product, we strongly recommended that the company reconsider spending any more time or money on redesigning the product container. The evidence was overwhelming, we said, that this issue, at least among consumers, was in every sense of the word actually a non-issue.

Did the company change its mind about pursuing a redesign of the product container? Not on your life! They said they simply had too much time and effort already committed to the project to turn around now!

So, rather than to redirect time, energy and resources to making sure that the product excelled on the most important characteristic, i.e., "organically grown," the company decided to consider examining this characteristic only after the project to redesign the shape of the package was completed, about another year down the road.

An isolated example? No way. We’ve seen this strong resistance to changing direction¾even when it’s abundantly clear that such a change should be made¾so many times in business that it’s not even surprising any longer. Oh, it’s still appalling, but certainly not surprising. Many of you undoubtedly have had the same experience.

Is this behavior characteristic of your company? If it is, you have our sincere empathy because your company is wasting valuable time, energy and precious resources "fixing" things that may not even be "broken," while letting things that may be "broken" go "unfixed." That’s certainly not a recipe for long-term success in any industry that we know of.