Editor's note: Dimitri Schmitow is owner of SUMAR, a Madrid, Spain, research firm. This article appeared in the April 20, 2010, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.

To describe the process of making sense of facts, as we do in the market research we conduct on a daily basis, the term and concept of "marketing intelligence" has been invented.
Although it appears that nobody has taken the trouble to accurately define this expression, the truth is that many old market research departments have adopted it as their new name and new motto. The idea is that, to understand the consumer and the market, what is important is no longer accumulating information so much as acquiring the necessary skill to select it, interlink it and find a logic and direction for it.
Obvious? Maybe. Difficult? Probably more than one would think.

Human intelligence

In chess, a game offering almost as many possible alternatives on its board as stars in the firmament, many years have passed since the most powerful computers have been able to win against the best of humans. What is amazing, however, is that this did not happen far earlier and that even now, from time to time, human intelligence is capable of giving the machines a nasty little shock.

Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer which played the now-legendary match against Gary Kasparov in 1997, could assess 200 million positions per second. Even so, the match ended with a score of Deep Blue defeating Kasparov by only one game (3.5 to 2.5)!

If we think that even the cleverest and best-trained human player is only capable of predicting a handful of alternative moves in such short time, the result is almost a miracle.
The major players talk about intuition, of an overall vision of the game. Or as Raul Capablanca, one of the very greatest, said, "You simply figure it out, you know it." What is absolutely certain is that it is all about squeezing the maximum result out of the minimal, practically insignificant available data.

Is it something akin to what is expected of us when we are asked to apply "marketing intelligence" in our daily working lives? I am afraid it is, including the unpleasant circumstance of having to make the decisions, like in chess, under the pressure of a ticking clock. Given that with supposedly the same intelligence the results we obtain are not the same as someone else's, the difference is, as Descartes said, "the method we are using." And he there and then sold us his own.

All very nice, but coming back to us, do we actually have any good method at hand for enhancing our capacity to select, link and better understand the information that reaches us and perhaps give it a new original meaning? It is true that increasingly more powerful and more diverse research techniques are available, but it is not the same. They are successful in developing new ways of access to information, but not so much in providing new cognitive tools to approach it. Naturally for this we have, as always, our acquired knowledge, experience, intuition, common sense, individual talent. That's not bad, but is there anything else we could add to this list?

Worth listening

When someone, very rarely, provides us with a truly fresh outlook on how we currently mold and process our reasoning and judgments, it is worth listening.

This was the sensation I had when I attended a rather unusual conference, hosted by AEDEMO, the Spanish marketing research organization. The speaker, Emmanuel Lizcaino, who is a linguist, mathematician and sociologist, presented the ideas from his book Las Metáforas Que Nos Piensan (Metaphors Which Think For Us). His main thesis is that language, as we all know, not only allows us to think certain things, but it also, at the same time, impedes us from considering and even also feeling, many others.

Language and its metaphors are like a powerful anti-spam filter. They separate "the thinkable" from "the unthinkable" and attribute legitimacy, relevance and meaning to some of the events and facts that we receive but not to others. This is a necessary and inevitable process of the deconstruction and construction of reality. But becoming aware of this and taking the trouble from time to time to revise and renew the "solidified" metaphors in our culture may reap unexpected advantages. It may broaden our perspective of the world and may improve our skills in "marketing intelligence."
 
What Lizcaino proposes, in a nutshell, is that we become detectives of our own language. When suspicious words, analogies or metaphors are discovered, they can be threatened and replaced with others, thus opening up our minds to other concepts, paradigms or insights.

Nobody dared open their mouth

I had the opportunity to confirm how all of this process works whilst one day attending a conference on communication.
Once the panel of speakers had finished their dissertation, the attendees were kindly invited to ask questions or make comments. Despite the fact that the conference was interesting and the invitation to ask questions was very insistent, nobody in the audience dared open their mouth. One had the sensation that many, myself included, would have liked to have spoken, but somewhere there was an implicit message hanging in the air that prevented anyone from doing so. I looked around me and this was when I saw that whilst the speakers were illuminated by a bright light on the stage, the rest of us were in the pit a few metres below and sitting in total darkness.

Since in our culture "above and below" denote clear hierarchical differences and "the light" as opposed to "dark ignorance" is the most common metaphor for knowledge, the metaphoric abysm which separated us became suddenly obvious. In fact, when the lights were switched on in the room things improved a little, although almost all the questions to our "bright speakers" were, as expected, made during the cocktail afterwards.

Metaphor-hunting

If the metaphor-hunting exercise could be applied to a conference why not apply it in market research?

Let's try.

We are all familiar with the common expression: "The facts speak for themselves." It is clear that the facts cannot speak unless through someone's mouth and that this someone, before speaking, has selected, edited and filtered them - which is why it is also said that they are "pure." To give them even greater power of conviction, some of these facts are offered to us as if they were material objects which can be seen and touched such as: "the solid evidence" and "the hard facts." All these metaphors tend to legitimize the fiction that there is a type of objective information which does not depend on anyone's subjective intervention or "interpretation" and for this reason in itself, it is the most esteemed and valuable. If we changed some of the words and said, for example, "the mute facts" or "the weightless reasons," our mode of addressing this information, as well as the conclusions and results, would probably be quite different.

Another concept which we use every day in market research is "respondent." The term originally comes from the legal field, a root it shares with "group discussion" inspired by popular juries. These group discussions are held, another coincidence, as we all know, behind a "one-way mirror" which reminds one of the interrogating rooms we see in so many films. Could this in fact condition our ability to understand the consumer and his or her reactions?

Let's take a look.

We ask the respondents to respond, but it never occurs to us to ask them to question. The mirror is only one-way, as are also the questionnaires to which one is supposed to answer the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Doubts and ambiguities are definitely unwelcome. The "group discussions" are presided over by a "moderator" who moderates against all excesses, and demands order and speaking spontaneously - but one at a time.

What would happen if instead we let the respondents do the questioning, switch the moderator into a stimulator and transform the group discussions into interactive groups, allowing the participants to express themselves with their whole body? We would probably lose some of our usual metaphors, but would probably gain some unusual insights.
 
Another fairly suspect word is "analysis." To analyze implies the idea that to understand something you need first to divide it, i.e., to cut it up into tiny parts with the hope that with a bit of luck you can later reconstruct it and better understand how it works. The image and metaphor this process evokes, because this is where it comes from, is that of the white-coated scientist in a laboratory mixing liquids or possibly doing a vivisection. Although it could be an effective method for treating inert material it is, however, not a highly recommendable procedure to practice on living beings, who, once separated into smaller parts, may possibly refuse to be revived.

But is this a good model for exploring the clues of human behavior? Let me suggest some reasonable doubts.

Maybe the clearest example of the traditional analytical thought in market research is the evaluation of a product from a list of attributes. The idea is to develop the product which scores best in the attributes that the consumer attaches the most weight or importance to, assuming that in this way it will "logically" be of the highest success. But surprisingly this is not necessarily so.

Consumers opt for the competitor hotel because they put a "free teddy bear on my bed" or stop buying the new model of a prestigious car because the shape of it from behind reminds them "of a minivan." Consumer decisions are increasingly linked to small, apparently insignificant details and to the harmony of the offer as a whole. A research approach based on rational, analytical and lineal logic is currently blind to both.

If we change the paradigm of "analysis" to "comprehension" - which implies covering and integrating information instead of separating it, this immediately gives rise to another type of questions and another type of findings. Test it out. 

A victim and a prisoner

A final example to consider for this article is the idea of the "consumer." The consumer is "the king" but could be also a victim and a prisoner of his own protocol. We are struggling to create products and services to satisfy his needs, but once defined and classified as a consumer of such and such type or brand, his freedom is over.

I once attended a perfect demonstration of this captive king metaphor during a conference about customer relationship management. The speaker presented a giant screen image of an overcrowded swimming pool in Japan and asked the audience how many types of "pool consumers" they could find there. He triumphantly explained that there were four: those in the water, i.e., those who liked the water, those who were sunbathing on the grass and liked the sun, those who were in the shade and preferred feeling fresher and the hungry ones who were in a queue buying food.

Each one of these groups would have unique and specific needs and the marketing aim was, naturally, to provide what each one desired and needed. The example seemed convincing save for the tiny detail that this was a static image. If it had been a film, not a photo, it would most probably entail that those who had been sunbathing, fed up with so much heat, had gone into the pool, those who were in the shade had moved into the sun and those who had been in the queue with their hot dogs had moved into the shade.

The world, as Vodafone says, is mobile and if we insist on fitting it into static boxes, it is highly likely that the king will escape us and go to other kingdoms.

Stretching the limits

I just wish to add that these few examples could be extended to many more, which I am sure will be occurring to you right now. Revising and reconstructing language and its metaphors is not strictly speaking a method or a formula, but an attitude. Each one of us can do the exercise of stretching the limits of our language in our own way and in accordance with our own rules. Changing words to change perceptions is mostly a DIY tool for our own personal usage, one which could lead to a competitive advantage in the form of more creative, insightful analyses of research findings. Because, at the end of the day, as the person on the safari said to his companion: "I know I can't run faster than the lion, but what I'm really worried about is whether I can run faster than you."