Build an Insight Engine: Mindset Metrics

Yesterday I promised to share a bit about building a system of metrics to implant an understanding of the customer mind directly into your operations. The output of this model can only be as good as the inputs so the first step in its construction is to ensure that the measures of customer mindset reflect the actual drivers of customer behavior. Earlier in the week, I discussed the power stories can have in helping you to glimpse the inner workings of the customer mind. The first challenge, then, is to turn the “soft” insights from the stories into the “hard” mindset metrics that will constitute effective gears in your insight engine.

A lot of customer research will look at factors such as “price” and “value” as drivers of customer mindset. The problem with these types of indicators is that, really, they don’t tell you much. If a customer tells you they don’t buy your product because it’s too expensive, all they’re really saying is that it’s not worth enough for them to pay that price. But why is it not worth enough to them? If you’re trying to sell an over-priced commodity, the answer is pretty obvious. Otherwise, one has to assume, you’ve priced your products the way you have for a reason. Somehow you’re not tripping the wire in the consumer mind that says “worth it.” Why not?

If you’ve got your stories right, then this will become apparent. Perhaps you’re trying to sell them an information service, and while the information would be useful to them, they’re resentful of all the information that gets dumped in their inboxes and all the sorting it requires. It may be that their issue isn’t “price” at all… it could be delivery method. They may not consider the service worth the price in that form, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t pay for it as, perhaps, continuous access to an access-as-needed web portal.

Instead of “price,” a better mindset lever in this case would be “control,” as in do they feel they have adequate say in how they access and use your product. As you might guess, it’d be pretty hard to come up with this as a key behavior driver off the top of your head. But that again is why the stories are so valuable….they illuminate what’s actually happening in the consumer decision-making process. While there’s something of an art to extracting just the right set of metrics from a collection of stories, it’s nonetheless a much more robust starting point than a list of generic indicators that are ultimately capable of only providing limited insight.