Making it simpler – the way of the barefoot insighter

Ten years ago we all knew what the internet was going to do. The buzzword was disintermediation giving customers direct access to products and services without expensive intermediaries. The very thing that profession had been created to protect against has meant that one protected bastion after another has tumbled thanks to the power of the web. The largest and most successful beneficiaries of this have been the internet super-brands which above anything else have made life simpler for their customers.  

So I am more than a little sceptical of the high priests preaching the virtues of big data, and big processing promising us more cleverness and more knowledge than ever before. Want to know what’s happening to your brand in real time on the internet? Want to passively track millions of your customers on their mobile phones. Because what they are claiming more often than not is proprietary: cleverness that you have to pay for. They’ve got a widget, a black box, an algorithm, an AI engine. I would like to give you several reasons why the law of disintermediation has not been suspended. Customer understanding is getting simpler not more complicated.  

Exhibit A – Maths hasn’t delivered strategic advantage
This is a golden age of mathematics – theorems several centuries old have been cracked through a combination of creativity and brute computing power. Mathematicians have been hired by the bucket load to work for stockbrokers, merchant bankers and forecasters. You might have thought that all of this brilliance would have conferred strategic advantage. But it has proven in the stock market at least to be a zero sum game. In New Jersey they are building server farms to get as close to the New York Stock Exchange as property rates will allow. But the rationale is to be able to save a couple of thousandths of a second bidding shares on your competition. So moving your computers closer to the NYSE confers a strategic advantage. It’s down to physics.

Exhibit B – Analysing populations doesn’t tell you more than analysing samples
It turns out that even when you do have the computing power to look at everything – something always gets left out. We knew this in the 1980s when Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem was well known in popular science texts. But we always hoped as computing speed and capacity increased, that we could get closer and closer to the truth. The illusion of completeness: If I can see all of my customers who are on Facebook or on Twitter. Then surely they must be talking about my brand? Or they will if I ask them? And they are typical of everybody else aren’t they? Actually they’re not. It turns out the way people use different information channels varies and fluctuates. Combining all your datasets together raises more questions than it answers. What you need is a simple understanding of your customers. Not a bigger bucket. Claude Shannon the father of information theory in the 1940s pointed out that you have signal and noise. And applying the concept of entropy from physics, noise increases faster than signal in a message. So the more you put in your bucket the more confused you get. Does that sound familiar?

Exhibit C - Analytics can’t tell you anything unless it answers business questions you have chosen to ask
Avinar Kaushik is an analytics expert who insists that the starting point is asking the right business questions... Kaushik now works for Google so can’t be taken as an unbiased commentator. But before he started to work with Google he recommended that if you aren’t deriving any benefit from your high powered analytics vendors that you switch them off and just use Google Analytics – a free service anybody (even your mum) can use. Once you used this free tool to work out how many prospects your online activities deliver, what is the most effective channel for converting them into customers and how much your customer costs to acquire you to do so then pay an online analytics vendor to help you answer those questions (if they have a unique way of doing that). But if you haven’t asked the right questions then a mailbox full of analytics reports is worthless.

Disintermediation is alive and well. It has rearrannged marketplaces by democratising them. In 1560 Elizabeth I was the only woman in England with a pair of silk stockings, by 1900 most women could afford them. That’s progress. I suggest that the trend for all of our information is becoming so accessible that even your mum can use it (and probably already does). What we need is not more algorithms or computing power but native human cleverness. And simplification.  

My name for this is barefoot insighting following the barefoot doctors which China used to resource its vast population. Even today two thirds of doctors working in rural areas in China started off as barefoot doctors. Barefoot insighters ask simple questions before diving into the data and trying to make sense of it. They point out simple patterns. We need to pay as much attention to how learnings are shared and stored in our organisations. Companies are stuffed with insights that key players don’t know because they get warehoused en route. The key is more simplicity not more complexity.  

If I am right then tools like Survey Monkey and Pinterest are becoming mainstream intelligence tools for ordinary people (like your mum) to form their opinions. Market research is being re-engineered for consumer use. I don’t expect my fellow professionals to agree with me. But as disintermediation spreads they will be powerless against it. When simple tools are put into the hands of your customers they will be better equipped to find the products they want – they are already watching YouTube to learn how to use your products better. They will value brands who put the power in their hands. The barefoot revolution is just well under way.

John Griffiths is the barefoot insighter! He runs his research and planning consultancy Planning Above and Beyond.