KENNA'S DILEMMA

People’s insight is difficult to understand and has been studied by many different ways, as understanding people feelings and interests seems to be the key to any success in that world. After reading kenna’s dilemma, what I’ve found is just lots of more examples in which people amaze and surprise by behaving in a way that others would never expect.


One of the most important lesson and one of the most substantial things that make people differ from any other animal in the world is that we are unpredictable. As individuals that reason, we have the power to change our mind in any moment as well as hide what are our real feelings about a concrete subject. People’s minds are so complex that even ourselves sometimes have problems to understand what are our real feelings or why we are behaving in that specific way.
To put an example, a recent study made by a Supermarket chain in Spain showed that 80% people that go to the supermarket have an specific list of what they want to buy when they get there. However, the study also revealed that about 90% of that people that had a closed list, changed their list and bought some other stuff once they got there. Why could it happen? People is supposed to be rational, and tend to order their life, but there’s so many factors affecting our decisions in any single moment that one little change in that environment can make us change our mind. And that is the big key for marketers, to deal with that environment, to persuade new and current customers to their products by moving as much factors as they are able in our atmosphere.

Another good lesson that I’ve learned by working in a company is that Marketers are usually biased by such many things in their surroundings that they cannot be threated as normal consumers.
As it’s the most easy research they can do, marketers tend to attribute their own characteristics to the market. However, that generally produces fatal mistakes in marketing. On the one hand, because we cannot project at all people’s thinkings and feelings since every single people is different from each other. And on the other hand and even more important, because generally marketers are even more biased than any other person. They know more information about the market than normal consumers and usually perceive much more things and details that are usually irrelevants for another single person. They are so used to their work and have experienced so much that several times what they predict by projection is a thousand miles far away from what a normal consumer would do in a normal way.

Then, as marketers we are going to be, how can we deal with that issue?
From avoiding projecting any of our feelings in our research, we need to pay attention in what our consumers are saying and not only in what they are really saying, which is less important, but in what they really wanted to say, what is, their expressions, their movements, their attitudes, their behavior, and so on. Normally, the key consist on not what they’re saying but what they’re keeping quiet.

“ The only normal people in the world, are the people we don’t know”