The Quantumization of Customer Insight

Dr. Mark Szabo

A recent Twitter thread asked people to explain quantum computing in one tweet. The winner said something like, "Computing is a light switch. A normal one is on/off. A Quantum one is a dimmer. Those nuances make it faster.” Customer insight is bring quantumized, as nuances in behaviours and attitudes become more findable and and also more important to brands. Two recent articles tackle this from different angles.

Interbrand’s 2019 report (https://www.interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2019/articles/the-end-of-positioning-introducing-iconic-moves/) really shakes things up with their idea of “iconic moves.” This might be this decade’s version of disruption.

The idea behind iconic moves is that the approach of brand positioning as a way to make sense of a competitive landscape is outdated because people now move faster than businesses. This reality is driven by an enormous range of choice, erosion of loyalty, speed of adoption and the blurred lines of product categories. By the time a brand figures out its positioning, customers have long since moved on.

The real nugget with this article is that businesses are increasingly less defined by industrial categories and more by the needs of the customers they serve. If brands are the relationships with their customers, it stands to reason that brands that move with their customers will replace sectors as a unit of analysis. Iconic moves, then, are the steps a brand must take in order to stay close understanding the user need and stay nimble enough to meet those needs in short order.

This thread is picked up in the Harvard Business Review article, “The Dangers of Categorical Thinking,” by Langhe and Fernbach (https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking). When we make decisions we’re naturally hard-wired to put information in buckets because that helps us make choices in the face of complexity. When it comes to market segmentation, for example, those buckets get in the way of our ability to pay attention to the very kinds of nuance in customer needs that Interbrand’s iconic moves approach says is so critical.

Langhe and Fernbach go on to outline some practical ways to avoid being “on/off switch” with your categories and more "dimmer switch" with nuances. Interestingly, the recommendations are very similar to the Interbrand approach.

The common theme with both articles is the requirement of putting user need front-and-centre in every decision. This sounds great, and nobody is going to openly argue with doing that. However, this principle is honored more in the breach than in the following. There are simply too many manifestations of our basic human nature embedded into our organizations. Unless a brand has a relentless focus on the customer and obliterates everything in its path, the old ways will creep back in.

Before you know it you’ll be back to positioning your brand based on three customer segments that make life easy, but miss the critical nuances that your competitors are seeing.

Will you keep up?