Understanding Consumers Deeply

I am reading a book called Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by Indi Young which was published in 2007. The book defines a mental model as: a visual depiction of the behavior of a particular audience, faithfully representing root motivations. A mental model of a typical morning for people who commute to work or school could be: get dressed, awaken myself, eat, and commute. Each of these behaviors can be broken down into separate activities like getting dressed divides into: get out of bed, wash up, brush teeth, prepare hair, face, decide what to wear, get dressed.

There are two parts of a mental model, the top part where activities and behaviors are listed as just shown and the bottom part where solutions that consumers in conjunction with the above activity. For example, the activities of getting dressed have things like: batteries, soap, hair care, oral care, shaving, skin care, cosmetics, cologne, fragrances and deodorant written underneath.

In the remainder of the book, the author outlines a detail a methodology of developing mental models. Personally, I find the work of this person really valuable. The key here is that the author's methodology uses ethnographic research to define the behaviors and from these behaviors, the author attempts to understand deeply the root motivations of the person’s behaviors, and truly understand the person’s thought processes.

I like this because it is the reversal of so much thinking in marketing, innovation and branding. All too often, we seek to understand a consumer's thought processes, attitudes, feelings, and emotions in the hope that we can influence or predict the behavior. This author works in reverse gear. If you want to understand behavior, why not start with behaviors in the context in which this behavior occurs, and then attempt to understand motivations and thought processes.

The author writes to help designers. Indi Young says, p. 9, …it can guide the design of the solution you are working on. It can help you, and your team, make good user and business decisions. And, it can act as a roadmap, ensuring continuity of vision and opportunity as the makeup of your team evolves over the next decade.

I would like to complement the author for writing this book. It shows extremely deep thoughts about mapping behaviors of people in the context in which they live, work and play. It shows a systematic way of understanding sequences and routines of behaviors and helps to understand more than what people are willing or able to say in an interview.

In my work, we use a similar methodology which we call the episodic reconstruction method. We reconstruct mental models or behaviors of people around episodes of interests. For a telecommunications company, we study how people live or “behave” around mobility, for a healthcare company, we study how people live around living healthy. There is much to learn from this book to make the work of mapping behaviors and constructing mental models valuable.

The book talks much about the design process, but what I find the most important lessons is how to develop a strategy for a firm, from the point of view of the behaviors of the people the company serves. This has the potential to add entirely new thoughts about strategy formulation. Instead of thinking of categories and adjacencies to target or segments to focus on, the approach of Indi Young helps to formulate strategies around what really matters to people – the behaviors they are trying to solve in their daily life.

A company that focuses its strategy on the behaviors or “mental models” of the people have that it tries to serve is guaranteed never to loose sight of its most important constituent, which is the customer or consumer who buys its products or services. This focus remains even as consumers change. Imagine what Sony could have done if it had not organized by segments and product category, but by the behaviors of its consumers around managing music. If it had organized the company along these lines, it would have learned, long before Apple showed the way, that consumers download music digitally (and illegally), that people change the entire way they managing music, their behaviors, from the world of buying a CD in a store, and listening on a Sony Walkman to downloading MP3 files from the web, and listening on the computer, etc. Is it possible that Sony could have seen the biggest opportunity in front of their eyes before Apple did?