The Infinite Learning

Let me tell you about a meeting I sat in early in my career.

A large Indian conglomerate. A well-known brand in a highly competitive category. The strategy session had been running for two days. The room was full of intelligent, senior people – the marketing director, the brand team, the agency planning department, a research firm presenting their findings.

On the wall were charts. Demographics. Psychographics. Usage and attitude data. A segmentation model that divided the consumer into five distinct types, each with a name and a photograph of a person who did not actually exist.

At one point, someone asked: has anyone in this room spoken to a consumer in the last six months?

The silence was long enough to be its own answer.

That was not an unusual room. In four decades of brand building, it has been, with very few exceptions, every room.

The research is not the consumer

The research report is not the consumer. The focus group transcript is not the consumer. The segmentation model, the persona card, the usage and attitude study – none of these are the consumer. They are representations of the consumer, filtered through research instruments designed to produce manageable data, presented in a format designed for boardroom consumption.

And somewhere in that chain – from the actual human being living her actual life, to the slide deck being presented in a room full of people who have never met her – something essential gets lost.

What gets lost is the only thing that makes brand strategy possible: genuine understanding of what a specific human being actually values. Not what she says she values when a researcher is asking. Not what she believes she is supposed to want. What she actually reaches for, and why.

What genuine understanding actually looks like

I spent fifteen years working with Hakuhodo of Japan (Percept Hakuhodo), where this question was taken with a seriousness I have not encountered anywhere else. The philosophy they called sei-katsu-sha – understanding the consumer not as a data point but as a living person – was not a research technique. It was a philosophical commitment to the idea that you cannot build a brand for someone you have never genuinely tried to understand.

And the understanding they were after was not the kind you get from a questionnaire.

It was the kind you get from sitting in her home. Watching, not asking. Looking at what is in her kitchen – what she keeps at the front of the shelf and what is pushed to the back. What is in her handbag and what that reveals about how she moves through her day. What is on her bedside table. What she cooks on a Tuesday evening and why. What the inside of her refrigerator looks like. What is on the walls. What is worn and what is new.

These details – mundane, specific, unhurried – tell you more about what a person actually values than any focus group question ever could. Because they are not answers. They are evidence. And evidence does not perform its aspirations. It simply is.

This is the quality of understanding that builds brands which last. Not demographic data. Not claimed behaviour. The quiet, observed reality of how a person actually lives and what genuinely matters to her in that life.

Most organisations have never done this work. And most brand strategies reflect exactly that absence.

The brief that reveals everything

After four decades, I can tell the quality of an organisation’s consumer understanding from a single document: the brief.

A brief written by people who genuinely understand their consumer is specific in a way that is immediately recognisable. It describes her not by age and income but by the precise tension she is navigating in this category – the thing she wants and the thing stopping her from having it. It describes the exact moment this brand enters her life and the exact job it does when it gets there.

A brief written by people who have studied their consumer but never understood her is different. Full of accurate information that somehow adds up to nothing actionable. The demographics are correct. The psychographic profile sounds plausible. And none of it answers the one question that matters: why would she choose this brand over the perfectly adequate alternatives already available to her?

That answer is never in the research report. It is in the conversation nobody had.

The question I ask in every strategy session

I have one question I ask early in every brand strategy session, before the research has been presented.

Not “who is your target consumer?” That produces demographics.

Not “what does your consumer want?” That produces aspirations.

The question I ask is: tell me about the last time someone on this team spent an afternoon with your consumer – not in a research facility, not in a focus group, but in her actual life.

Most of the time, the answer is a long time ago. Often, the answer is never.

And until that changes, the strategy will be built on assumptions dressed up as insight. Assumptions that produce campaigns communicating the brand’s beliefs about itself rather than the consumer’s reality. Positioning that sounds compelling in a boardroom and means nothing on a shelf.

The most valuable thing any brand organisation can do is go and meet the person they are building everything for. Sit with her. Watch. Listen. Not in a research context. In her life.

Everything else should flow from that.

When it does, it shows. When it doesn’t, that shows too. It just takes a little longer to appear in the numbers.

Article by Amitava Mitra

Brand Strategy and Marketing Communications Consultant and Co-Founder of The Infinite Learning — a leadership and professional capability development company. TEDx Speaker and Amazon Bestselling Author of Happy Customers. Happier Brands.