Every interaction that your customers have with your business and products builds their image of your brand. The majority of these interactions nowadays are generically designed and mass-produced as the process of understanding customers, building products and services for them and then communicating with them has largely stayed the same: Focus groups. Marketing requirements. Product requirements. Messaging Briefs. Launch. Repeat. The result is the slew of products and messages that feel as though they weren’t created with a single human being in mind.

Fast Co Design recently highlighted this exact concept by referring back to an Apple Human Interface Guide from 1985 — a time when personal computers terrified most people:

“You must remember that you are dealing with a human being and tailor your interface to deal gently with the kind of fears and anxieties that the very existence of your program may provoke.”

It was a forward-looking statement that ended up defining much of Apple’s product marketing strategy even today, 38 years later. It’s called user-centered design and it’s been a cornerstone of good design since the 80s. Unfortunately, too many products and communications are designed within the context of rigid processes and quantitative research — not the customer. The result is a feeling that most companies are throwing everything they can at the market and seeing what sticks.

The Root Cause of the Problem

Since most designers and engineers are building products that they themselves will never use, they rely on product marketers to collect market research and tell them what the most important features are. Ditto for communications strategists who rely on market research data to tailor their pitches. To gain good insight into the market, large sets of potential customers are trotted into focus groups and asked a series of questions. The data is averaged, redistributed, and analyzed on such a broad scale that it’s easy to forget that nth participant is an actual person who walked into that focus group and had their own story, their own feelings and their own distinct needs.

In the process of turning this large set of data into insights, insight into the humanity of customers is, in fact, lost. Big Data turns into little information. The target market becomes an overwhelming, faceless blob of metrics leading to a senseless stream of products, services, ads and even startups that just don’t seem to be making anything of real value.

The Current, Failing Solution

So, how do you avoid this trap? How do you build products and messages for real-life human beings? Up to now, conventional wisdom suggests that good marketers and designers will do it instinctively — they’ll see past skewed data and research, and they’ll present compelling solutions. While a team of A-list talent certainly helps, a gut instinct is difficult to argue for in a corporate world filled with bureaucracy. Some marketers turn to twisting data to prove their point but in doing so they degrade the reliability of the research even further.

Instead, product marketing managers, designers, engineers and communication strategists need to get down and dirty with their target market — speaking to them, watching them and pulling as much qualitative data as they can. It’s called ethnographic research or consumer behaviorism, and it involves analyzing how consumers act and why they act that way on a psychological level. It’s a lot of work which doesn’t scale well. It’s also a large investment that most companies try to avoid.

The Future of Customer Insights

So how do you collect a large set of compelling data without spending thousands of hours acting as your potential customers’ therapist? You have to go deeper. Deeper into what makes them human. Deeper into understanding their reactions. Deeper into what makes them tick.

Biomarketing is how we at nürltec help clients get closer to their customers than ever before. By considering their biological reactions to user interfaces, products, retail experiences, ads, websites, etc. nürltec is able to provide insight into the humanity of customers without losing out on the large data scale that comes with focus groups and quantitative research. And by drawing insights from quantitative data in the context of human behavior and biological functions, we’re able to help designers, engineers, strategists and marketers drive changes within the organization and become more customer-centric.

Through Biomarketing we’re helping clients build better products, connect more intimately with customers, and help bring humanity back into the equation. If this is something you’ve been struggling with in your organization, and you’re looking for deeper insights than your competitors are getting then connect with us for an initial consultation. Let us help you understand your customers’ humanity.