The Big Lie: . . . or Interpreting Your Global Customer’S Inner Life for Profit

By Future Foundation

Future Foundation
is a trends and forecasting agency with global reach
has been operational for nearly twenty years
is completely independent of any other company or organization
beyond sharing general values, has no political opinions
partners and counsels more than two hundred corporate clients
runs its own data bank of opinion research findings, going back years
probes consumer opinion in twenty-eight countries on an annual basis
manages its own team of two hundred trendspotters across the globe
is committed to excellence in the visual and verbal presentation of ideas and intuitions
holds as its motto and its goal Science Meets Creativity
is in business to see its clients prosper through the ingenious application of enriched insight into the lives of consumers, citizens, people

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Aug 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452578910

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 Christophe Jouan, Meabh Quoirin, James Murphy.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

1-[phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-7890-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-7891-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013913755

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/26/2014

CONTENTS

The Big Lie Second Imprint: Preface

Where the story begins…

Chapter One Ever Smarter Consumers, Endlessly Irrational Choices

Chapter Two Power of Me, Value of We

Chapter Three Comfortable Lives, Uncomfortable Truths

Chapter Four The Call of Yesterday, The Scream of the New

The Big Lie: using the story to push your business forward

Glossary of Future Foundation Trends

The Authors

THE BIG LIE

SECOND IMPRINT: PREFACE

Our Big Lie hinterland…

The Big Lie was first published in the fall of 2013. This is our first reprint and update. Thank you for buying, downloading, reading, browsing, whatever.

We have kept the original text intact and we happily offer it here.

In this new preface though, we take stock of the evolution of our story and recast it for new readers.

Since its publication, we have received a great deal of positive response from clients, potential clients, commentators, friends in the business community, former staffers, fellow analysts. All of this has had the effect of a) re-convincing us about the practical validity of the Big Lie narrative and b) driving us to take the theme forward into ever more profit-focused advice for consumer-facing corporations.

Across all the multiple business sectors where we operate, the demand has grown for us to re-scrutinize specific socio-economic trends and re-tool them under the light of the Big Lie proposition. This demand became all the more insistent as we all, consultants and businesses alike, came to struggle with the explosive promise of Big Data and the rumbling revolution that is Predictive Analytics. This meant that our analysis had to be filtered through the ever expanding big bang of social media listening; in this universe, the essential duplexity of the modern consumer—a theme which defines the Big Lie proposition in our text—has to be seen in new lights. We talk more about this in a few paragraphs from now.

Big Lies and Gigabytes

As we proceeded, the fundamental insight question became thoroughly purified along the way.

And it was this: can we really isolate consumer motive underneath all the veils of discretion and disguise which the Digital Age provides and, if we can, just how much does it matter to optimized commercial decision-taking?

Is there, furthermore, the possibility that the insight community can gather too much traditional intelligence about consumers—their hopes and fears, their dreams and prospects, their whimsies and their tastes—intelligence of a kind just so costly to gather and just too clutteringly unhelpful in the 21st century now?

We deal with this general proposition at different points in our book. What follows below is an update, a re-working, a re-statement of our own Big Lie faith along with a comment on some new trend pathways that we are busy exploring. Trends analysis can never be merely an invitation to philosophize about life and shopping. It has to address the commercial topicalities of our time with usable, opportunity-refining advice. So:

Let’s say you are the CMO of a giant grocery chain. What does data science say to you these days? Things like: Do you really need to know any more about just why that lovely old Grand Rapids couple (a perfect representation of one of the consumer segments your marketing team uses) likes / buys fruit-flavored, low-fat yogurts—when you can more algorithmically understand the conditions under which on any given week they will be likely to buy more or less or the same amount of the product?

You run the sales operation for an airline. Hear the data science cry: Do you really need to know more about why that nice Mr and Mrs Morales from Lubbock TX prefer extended Winter vacations to short Summer ones? All that matters surely is that their eminently trackable behavior is so programmatic that you can beckon them into your best deals without too much extra debate (about who they really are and what they are really seeking from the travel experience). No?

You are in the drugstore business. Data science again: Do suppliers of flu treatments need to know anything other than at what point on the Gaussian distribution has the current up-state outbreak come to rest? Focus groups with regular customers not really so much use here, are they?

The Big Lie, we do stress at this point, drives Team Insight in the opposite direction to such pointed questioning. The whole proposition confounds the more lavish Big Data claims. For that proposition insists that precisely because of the wonders of the digital age consumer attitude has to be dissected with ever greater refinement.

Let us state our case, of which we are certain. No brand, now and forever, can compete on analytics alone.

And this means that the most aggressively profit-seeking brands will maintain their listening station, the one which sits on the frontier between all that consumers want to be known or believed about themselves and all that they, across the multiple consumption moments of their day, actually desire and do. Our digital age naturally re-adjusts social reality; it messes with the norm-thesaurus of our times. The content of social conversation becomes super-charged. If you only knew what I talked about, sings Miley in Fly on the Wall, When I’m with my friends just hanging out. It’s an insight professional’s mnemonic couplet for our times. For it reminds us that insight has to compare and contrast the signals that consumers emit in the conversations generated in conventional research (when, say, they tap answers onto a screen questionnaire) and in all the criss-crossing traces they leave on social media. An arduous task. But has to be done.

Indemnifying identity

Think of some of the inner interrogations that flow from this theme. Think of the way we live now and the behaviors which fuel or which alternatively damage the perceived acceptability of our lifestyles.

Is it OK to pretend to be someone else? Am I entitled to a hidden me, maybe a bit of a dark side, when I am online? Am I allowed to interfere with my image—is this a form of creativity or a new means of lying? Does it matter that when I post my vacation photos, I have them re-mastered first? Is it still cool to post selfies? Do all we users of social media apply and expect more diluted forms of human truth? Is it really rather authentic to be a little bit fake these days?

Indeed, do all we consumers have a special duty not to be too open and honest given the penetration of our privacy that sophisticated online tracking has come to mean? Is this how the social cookies crumble now?

In her work on one of our new trends called Fake Is The New Forte, our Consumer Analysis VP in New York, Heather Corker, regularly uses a couple of killer vox pop quotes from the qualitative interviews we run with both our TrendSpotters and ordinary consumers. They suggest a serious amount of popular awareness, down there on Main Street, of the strategic agendas we are opening here.

I think you need to tailor your personality online. So that it is authentic but just not 100% true and open… because you don’t want to expose contentious qualities.

I only show my best side on the social networks. Authenticity isn’t my priority. It is clearly a tool of image management.

Fake Is The New Forte is, in effect, a story of the game-ified self, a kind of Big Lie 3.0. As our quotes imply, the modern consumer actively plays with her identity and plays also with the third parties—specially brands—who would like to get to know her better. Even the practice of appearing barefaced and unadorned in the world of #NoFilter is just another form of creative presentational curation. The selfie is just one of many selves. From our researches around the world, it is becoming pretty clear that hardly anyone believes that presenting an image true to yourself on social media is a moral virtue at all.

Meanwhile, around 20% of adult Americans in our under-34 sample are telling us now that they wish they could be more like the person they present to others on social media. This is a finding with the force of a revelation. We are referencing, after all, around 80 million Americans here. (And can we believe that this sentiment is more widespread, that the real figure is higher than 20%? Yes, we can). Just how does it come to pass that so many are willing to hyperbolize—the human itch presumably at work here—their attractions, their skills, their achievements, their sophistications? Well, maybe there is nothing new in such self-inflation—a social phenomenon as common online as it once was over the picket fence or over cocktails in the country club pavilion. But the opportunities for deception, both casual and telling, are so much richer these days. This is the very fertilizer of the Big Lie.

Our working assumption here is that the more conversation proliferates across the globe, the more Big Lie moments occur. And the science of analytics, producing many marvels as it is, just cannot cover all the bases of human choice.

We understand that some dating agencies are now, via their Big Data machinery, making claims that the search for a life-partner can be absolutely perfected. But is everything that those seeking a big date say about themselves likely to be 100% true? Is the blemish not to be concealed at least just a little? Can the clever algo really know in advance whether Lisa would like Jack—any more than whether Mid-West Soccer Moms will, whatever the subtle tracking of their behaviours and preferences, buy that new juicer which has just been brought to market? Can Predictive Analytics tell you that you will still be in love with your husband in the same way in five years’ time? The intimacy market, any market, just does not seem to work that way.

All marketers have, in whichever society they work, to deal with a measure of inevitable disorder, disruptions to probability, the reality of entropy. No consumer market—à la Laplace’s Demon—can be perfectly determinable. Insight still has to use every means, conventional and super-scientific, to know their customers in the round. All that causes a consumer’s choice or contributes to the satisfaction which that consumer draws from buying a Toyota, changing her hair color, switching from Cosmopolitan to Self, buying a gift at half the price originally considered, suddenly adopting this very day the Cabbage Soup Diet… has to be followed. And consumer motive cannot be cut neatly into gingerbred men.

A lot more conversation

As part of our global research program, we recently asked young Americans about their bedtime habits.

Please. Sensitive readers do not need to look away now.

We were referring to the culture of communication which exists when people have officially retired for the day and find themselves between the sheets. Around 70% of 16-24s tell us that they regularly browse the internet while in bed at night; around 75% regularly send texts; over 60% regularly check their personal emails; nearly 30% regularly tweet. Significant proportions tell us they do these things every night. Once more, of course, we suspect that all these numbers are artificially depressed, to some degree, by prevailing social codes. In answering our question sequences, at least some of our respondents will be alert to the danger that, if they are not careful, they will expose themselves as super-sad, never-log-off zombies with an unmistakeable addiction issue. Who is going to say: I never, day or night, switch off any of my machines or put any of my conversations on hold? And hot damn am I proud of it! Well, some… But…

So, just like the poet says, the vox humana swells. The very multiplicity and simultaneity of conversations taking place naturally creates a ferment of verbal nuance, evasion, mis-direction, limited disclosure, fatigued blurting, guileful image-management, exaggeration for perceived personal gain… The consumer-citizen’s ego has become pretty diffuse in a basically benign version of what psychiatrists call dissociative identity disorder. We can be many people nowadays. What price a simple agree-disagree statement in an online quantitative survey in these circumstances? Who is it who is answering? Which one of us? And in which of our variable moods and modes?

A paradox crackles over our discussion here. Never before in history have the actual, verifiable choices and behaviors of consumers been more accurately and more sedulously counted than they are today. If you are any kind of shopper, then super-clever systems can track your location, follow your movements via your smartphone, perform sentiment analysis on you, draw significance from your ambulatory browsing, activate knowledge of your previous purchases, check any break in your normal habits, take the weather on the streets and factor its impact on your mood… Amazon and Wal-Mart (and the other national equivalents around the world) know more about your inner self than your priest or your rabbi or your spiritual coach.

In May 2014, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology delivered its report entitled Big Data and Privacy. Early in what is a totally compelling study, the authors are talking about two different types of data, basically structured and analog. Though the jargon makes a dry read, it is impossible to miss the consequences of what they describe as-and-when the two types learn to communicate with one another.

"Data fusion occurs when data from different sources are brought into contact and new facts emerge. Individually, each data source may have a specific, limited purpose. Their combination, however, may uncover new meanings.

In particular, data fusion can result in the identification of individual people, the creation of profiles of an individual and the tracking of an individual’s activities. More broadly, data analytics discovers patterns and correlations in large corpuses of data, using increasingly powerful statistical algorithms".

They go on to conclude that anonymization is increasingly easily defeated. They add that it is not even clear that data, even small data, can be destroyed with any high degree of assurance. In other words, there is no place for any of us to hide anymore and there is to be no sweeping of the past for or by anyone. Cyberspace has become one huge invisible Pinkerton’s. We leave our consumerist DNA all over everywhere, both time and space. And so, the Big Bro can interpret your dreams so much better than Dr. Freud. What is that Christmas song? He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. So be good for goodness sake. Quite.

In the body of the Big Lie, we set out to dramatize how, even and precisely in the midst of all these transparencies, the study of the consumer’s inner and outer selves remains the first discipline of insight. This is hard work, tough intuition. And the consumer-citizen is rarely going to offer too much direct help on her own. If we were to put a statement into one of our regular questionnaires along the lines of I wish that all those companies trying to sell me things knew a whole lot more about me, would we expect a surge of enthusiastic agreement? Well, what do you think?

Renewing the rules of 21st century engagement: brands, trends, simplicities

This is what we believe.

As Big Data knowledge accumulates, so the battle to protect or to expand brand-share has, if anything, to accelerate round some very tight new corners. There may be two major grocery chains holding as much as 40% of the market in the US. At this very minute, they know an enormous amount about their regular customers and can target discounts on them with drone-like precision and personalization. But when both parties and indeed all their smaller competitors share the same basic data science then what drives, on the margins, comparative success? Even more data? Or, rather, fantastic product innovations? Or a promotional language which speaks adroitly to consumers’ inner selves? The answer is blowin’ in the web.

Science cannot completely fix people in the sense of automating their behaviors. Consumers do not have circuits. Even with all the terabytes in, er, China behind it, not every brand can be equally successful. Yes, we might well conclude that the emergence of Big Data exploitability favors incumbent rather than challenger brands in so many sectors (supermarkets, energy supply, personal communications, entertainment…); it certainly offers a route to consolidated loyalty and repeat-purchasing. But will all the Big Data one can generate actually put an end to all blockbuster movie turkeys, all disastrous ad campaigns, all over-spend on corporate social responsibility programs, all market failures… in the context of gradual elimination of commercial opinion research and the probing of consumer desires? No. It will do no such thing. No marketing department will ever be able to use a 3D printing machine to create a customer over whom Pavlovian control can be exerted.

For marketers have to adjust to what we will call the dynamic instability of modern identity, a process driven by the very technologies which putatively endow companies with supreme intelligence about their customers. In their book, The New Digital Age: reshaping the future of people, nations and business, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google reflect on this new essentialism of identity.

"The impact of this data revolution will be to strip citizens of much of their control over their personal information in virtual space…The challenge we face as individuals is determining what steps we are willing to take to regain control over our privacy and security…

In the future, our identities in everyday life will come to be defined more and more by our virtual activities and associations… Your online identity in the future is unlikely to be a simple Facebook page; instead it will be a constellation of profiles…

The shift from having one’s identity shaped off-line and projected online to an identity that is fashioned online and experienced off-line will have implications for citizens, states and companies".

The last paragraph is, in our view, a fizzing stick of dynamite tossed into the den of insight.

And we love this language because it emphasizes this theme of control—a theme which is energizing so many of our new Future Foundation trend coinages.

Sympathy for the Devil in the Detail…

Now, a trend has to show brand leaderships a faster, more secure route to tighter and more valuable engagement with at least one segment of consumers, current or in prospect.

In Guanxi Dreams, for example, a trend which debuted at one of our client conferences in 2014, we narrate the different ways in which progressive and inventive brands are trying to humanize the business of consumer purchasing online, building networks of warmth and connection while abjuring the cold, impersonal click. Substantial numbers of consumers now tell us, in different parts of the world, that they like it when online shops recognize my name and that they would value a live human voice when they are seeking advice online about a product choice. The sheer inventiveness and multiplicity of emerging concierge service propositions confirm the reality of this story, which has still a long way to run. But, more, our whole trend here speaks to the merit in locating new styles of engagement with consumers, new ways to build intimacies, new determinations to discover why they a) say what they want and b) actually buy—not always at all synonymous.

Even under the marvels of Big Data, there will be, from moment to moment, consumer-citizens who are today buying that brand of fragrance for the very first time; contemplating a vacation in the never-before-visited Alaskan