Do You Know What You Want?

Do you know exactly what you want in a product? What about in a service?

Here is a long (18min) video from Malcolm Gladwell at TED in 2004. Watch it if you want but it has only some bearing on the rest of this post. In 2004, Gladwell also released this article in the New Yorker (The Ketchup Cunundrum).

Consumers are naturally dumb. Not to say they’re unintelligent or anything along those lines. But when it comes to knowing exactly what they want they have almost no idea what they want or what will make them happy.

So what does this mean for us as marketers in a social world? There is no reason we shouldn’t know what our potential clients want! That may be stretching it a bit, but with the wealth of information and the range of demographic & psychological analytics we can derive from information posted (thanks to restaurant check-ins and social ratings), we can cater directly to the clients unknowns.

As consumers it’s likely they will not know exactly what they want, but we as the providers can take this information and take a look into their tastes. By using this information we can develop strategies for companies that cater directly to these people and literally exploit the things that they love.

Mashable! also related to the way consumers behave on internet but from an alternate perspective, User Competency in Social Design.

If these are simple assumptions that Adrian Chan is making, then we can also assume much more about their behavior based on their previous trends.

Let me know what you think! Leave a comment!