Capturing Unmet Needs - What Can Market Researchers learn from Adult Colouring Books?
Are you into the adult colouring book craze? Or are you, like many, scornful of this pencil-and-paper movement as infantilist?
Whatever your position, there's no denying that this colouring book phenomenom is both a huge global success, and a surprise - it was unplanned, as interviews with Johanna Basford (http://bit.ly/1xklWcN), the Scottish "illustrator and ink-evangelist" widely credited with kick-starting the craze, confirm.*
To those of us working in Insights on innovation projects (sounds better than Market Researchers, doesn't it?), it gives reason to pause, to ponder: is there anything in there that we could and should learn from?
Here's my take:
1. Think Consumer-Category needs, not Product Specific
All Companies ultimately sell products, units - too many Companies still think like that, with a sales- and supply chain mentality reversing itself powerfully into the Marketing, and then (finally) the Insights department. "We HAVE to sell more pencils, Pete" - "but people don't want more pencils, Mary"....."hmmm maybe we need a different promotional strategy, a new retail channel, expand into new geographies".....sound familiar?
The adult colouring book craze should have been a no-brainer for the wonderful pencil-supplier brands out there: it's wIhat people DO with pencils that count, ie draw pictures, illustrate pieces of paper, whatever.
An approach that thinks narrowly about product improvement will only come up with different kinds of pencils in many ways - and not focus on what pencils are used for, the "job" (to borrow the Nielsen term and concept) they have been tasked with.
Seems simple? Yes - but it does require a new approach from all those involved in the executional part of innovation processes, that you need to think beyond "what can our current equipment do, however differently" to "can we explore being involved in a new category" with all that entails - cooperations, new retail channels, even new machinery, so yes, CAPEX.
Sometimes those opportunities are on your own door-step.
2. Get Close to Your Audiences - listen, observe. Or put more simply: DO MARKET RESEARCH
The innovation step in the colouring-book example was simple: taking a children's product into an adult market. Hardly complicated. Very adjacent. No real step-change.
Still, it hadn't been done before - one wonders why not.
If publishers or pencil manufacturers had observed how their children's colouring books were being used, then they would easily have seen how both Dads and Mums would sit with their kids helping them choose colours, colouring in together. Having fun together.
It's a pretty strong argument for engaging in market research. Engaging in ethnographies, over time. Simple stuff, really.
Oh - and always, always note emerging usage occasions - the one's that statisticians would regard as outliers. They could be telling you something about tomorrow's mainstream.
3. Monitor Trends - and exploit Push-Back Opportunities.
Monitor trends, understand how they are likely to impact your business, plot scenarios - all important stuff, and something that the world's leading companies already engage in. Fewer people talk about mining opportunities in the push-back movements that result in retro or reverse-trends.
An example. Everyone is currently obsessed with digital - to introduce efficiency, sure, to reach across geographies at low cost, offering the economies of scale attractive to Venture Capitalists. It's not just a dominant business narrative - it's megaphone stuff.
There was exploration in the pencil business in linking up digital to analogue - but it didn't seem to take off in the way that the colouring-book has. Did the hunt for something on-trend, digital blindside those in the game to the more urgent, broader, powerful need: to put our smartphones down, to not get distracted by Twitter? Analogue. Pure and simple.
Sounds boring? OK, then reframe it: call it a yearning for simpler times, nostalgia, a creative urge that its unfulfilled by checking google all day for emails. Ethnographies and IDIs would have almost certainly picked this up.
If you apply this thinking to the Market Research industry, my take would be we will see a switch back to the experiential - face-to-face conversations, real-life observations, lots of contextual detail, lots of smaller numbers accompanied by visuals that engage emotionally and get people to start doing stuff. Yep - qualitative research is well placed ;)
To conclude: I've not seen a business case written yet about the adult colouring-book trend, but to me it's seminal.
Johanna Basford's 3 adult colouring books have sold over 10 million copies worldwide to date (the Sunday Times quotes 16 million/ 20.03.2016), they have made the Amazon top 10 beststeller lists - all from one illustrator with an idea, an aversion to computer-generated graphics, and a publisher willing to take a very small risk.
The crux of the matter: how many such cases exist? Where a bit of ethnography might tap into usage situations that manufacturers are simply blind to?
It's such a compelling case for market research - just a shame that it didn't seem to play a role in this instance. Maybe more and more MR folk are too busy mining the data or generated by existing customers rather than thinking of ways of gaining new users.
Whatever the reason - doing the right type of market research would have been the answer to this business challenge. All sorts of indutries, companies of all sizes could benefit massively by doing ethnographic, observational research to help tap into massively attractive new markets and new usage occasions.
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.
* Guardian April 5, 2015 - http://bit.ly/1C4xeig; Daily Telegraph, April 10 2016 - http://bit.ly/1LEcJzY