By Martin Lindstrom, {grow} Community member
Some years ago, while driving from Poland to Vienna, my GPS broke down. Forget about buying a printed map. They’d vanished in the two decades since I’d last looked for one.
My navigational skills are questionable and I’d only been in the area once before, but I had no choice other than to point the car in what I guessed was the right direction and simply drive. Remarkably, I arrived at my destination without a single wrong turn.
When I puzzled over how I’d managed, I could only come up with one conclusion: I had allowed my instincts to run the show.
I define an instinct as an accumulation of insights obtained though decades of experiences, all guiding the seeker to an answer. An instinct is the art of connecting thousands of impressions. One can’t consciously explain how all those dots were connected. They simply were.
Some of the most powerful business leaders of all time share one thing. They trust in their instincts.
Legendary instincts
One example is Rupert Murdoch, who reportedly reads every one of his newspapers every morning. That’s more than 50 newspapers every day. If a headline is out of line with what he believes his readers want, he’s on the phone to his editors. He has the knack of putting himself in his reader’s shoes, whether it’s a business reader of the Wall Street Journal, a worker reading the New York Post, or a British housewife reading The Sun.
The founder of IKEA was no different. You’d find the enigmatic Ingvar Kamprad running cash registers in his stores. Why? Because he was determined to understand not just what people buy, but also why. Sitting at the checkout stand let him interact with customers, one at a time.
“There is only one boss,” said Sam Walton, legendary founder of Walmart. “The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” You’d often find Walton walking around his stores, chatting up his customers.
Keeping the consumer first
Last year, NBC asked me to turn around a range of small businesses across North America for their Today Show. I quickly realized that these businesses shared one problem: a serious disconnect with the consumer. Time after time, owners viewed their businesses from their own perspective, rather than from the consumer’s viewpoint.
One of the retailers was a 100-year-old shop named Veach’s Toy Station. As I entered their store, their lack of customer focus struck me instantly. So, I lined up the entire staff and asked them to join me on our hands and knees to crawl through the store. I wanted them to see the world from a six-year-old’s perspective. “Can you reach that toy?” I asked. “Can you see that doll? Can you play with that car?” They answered, No, of course not. But wasn’t their primary consumer a child below the age of ten?
I’m reminded of the late Michele Ferrero, Italy’s richest man, owner of Nutella, Kinder Surprise, Ferrero Rocher, and Tic Tac. Some years ago, Ferrero was spotted on all fours, crawling through a retail store to test whether children could reach his chocolates.
Get out of the office
Leaving the office and entering the world of consumers can be uncomfortable.
Suddenly, you’re stripped of your expensive tie, your name tag, and your flashy watch — all those things that contribute to your image. As you join your consumers in your shop aisles, or even in their homes, you become an ordinary person. But how can you know how your consumer thinks if you never stand in his or her shoes?
Remember my definition about instinct as an accumulation of thousands of observations? Isn’t that the secret of Murdoch, Kamprad, Walton, and Ferrero?
I will argue, strongly, that successful business leaders will be those have the guts to go offline in an online dominated world, who nurture their instinct by staying present. After all, your competition has all the same data that you have, and it will lead them to the same conclusions. Observing consumers and maintaining your instinct can never be copied.
Data doesn’t create meaning. We do. The executive needs to be far more than a data analyst. He should constantly strive to see the world from a customer’s point of view. I believe that the truly dynamic business leader of the future, though immersed in a flood of Big Data, will need the courage to adapt the mindset of the consumer. They must dare to trust their instincts.
Martin Lindstrom, one of the world’s foremost branding experts, is author of Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends
