Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

by Martin Lindstrom

By studying the number of fingerprinted smudge marks on a phone or tablet screen, it’s easy to determine the approximate age of its owner.

The presumption of everyday friendliness, combined with the lack of physicality—those were the first two pieces of small data I picked up in the United States. There was a third, too, that could be distilled to one word: rounded. In the United States, almost no public rooms or areas are rectangular, or sharply cornered.

In every other country across the world, guests staying at a hotel are free to open the windows in their rooms, with the exception of one: the United States. American hotel windows are sealed, or painted shut, or manufactured in such a way that they can’t open or close in the first place.

Visit any comedy club, or watch Bridesmaids, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy or Louis CK’s routines on YouTube, and you’ll realize that Americans pay comedians millions of dollars to talk about things most of them have felt, or thought, but never said in public.

In a country whose workers take the fewest number of vacation days of any people in the world, smartphones would seem to compound the pressure Americans feel to look and seem busy.

were children. The Somatic Marker Hypothesis is a term coined by neuroscientist and author Antonio Damasio in his 1994 book Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.

It may be hard to believe, but our color preferences often form based on the colors of our bedroom walls as children. A few years ago, a European multinational asked me to help them align the nearly half-a-dozen companies in its portfolio under a single color. It wasn’t simply a question of deciding on red, or yellow, or orange, or green. Every man and woman in the business meeting had their own ideas, or preferences, meaning that I not only had to find the right color but also bring together a dozen senior executives, all of whom believed their color choice was the correct one.

In the end, there was a roughly 80 percent correlation between the color each person had chosen to represent the “family” of companies, and the color on the walls of his or her childhood bedroom.

In supermarket lingo, the “shadow line” refers to the darkness that falls over the top of a package when a supermarket shelf is too deep, or when the overhead light lands at a wrong angle. The mixture of light, and how it strikes a product, tends to leave a lot of products in darkness. This same shadow line had a marked effect on what an Indian mother-in-law saw when she gazed at cereal packaging. At the same time, from her height and perspective, what she saw was, in fact, ideal. There were colors she liked and appreciated the most, the vibrant, vivid, rich-hued ones that conveyed to her that the product in front of her was “fresh.”

Friendship may be tribal, but it works the other way around, too. The bodies of our friends can affect our own physical appearance. A nearly ten-year-old study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that “obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus . . . When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight too.”1 Explains Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, a principal investigator in the new study, “One explanation is that friends affect each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.”

Lots of people are inspired by the presence of water, whether they’re strolling along a beach, taking a shower or even listening to water running or to a soundtrack of waves hitting the shore. The Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer Archimedes was said to have discovered the principles around density and buoyancy as he drew a bath, and songwriter Pharrell Williams begins each morning the same way: “I shower, and that’s where a lot of my concepts come from,” Pharrell told Fast Company. He even composes songs under a nozzle. “If you don’t interrupt (your subconscious) with the ego, or are like, No it’s gotta be like this, then a lot of ideas will come.

When we actively pursue answers or solutions to a problem, they almost never materialize, but when we engage in routine, relaxing activities that require little active thought, they do. Shelley H. Carson, a Harvard University researcher and psychologist, said once that if we’re troubled by a problem, any interruption in focus provides “an incubation period . . . In other words, a distraction may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on the ineffective solution.”

At the same time, a certain kind of activity is better than others at encouraging new or good ideas. Ideally, that activity is both routinized and inventive, like running, bicycling or gardening. All three involve implicit, automatic motions that are also improvisational, allowing disparate ideas to come together.

Most remember Hitchcock as a skilled storyteller, but what few know is that the director shot his movies using two separate scripts. The first, known as “the Blue Script,” was entirely functional. In it were all the tangible onscreen components, including dialogue, props, camera angles and set descriptions. The second script, which Hitchcock referred to as “the Green Script,” chronicled in fine detail the emotional arc, or “beats,” of the film he was shooting. Hitchcock relied on both scripts, but the Green Script reminded him how he wanted moviegoers to feel, and at what point, as they watched Suspicion, or Shadow of a Doubt, or North By Northwest.

Westerners who’ve never traveled abroad don’t realize the extent to which American movies and actors, and Hollywood imagery, dominate overseas cinemas and markets.

Americans, I’d learned, walked less than any other industrialized nation on earth, with the average US native taking 5,117 steps daily compared to 9,695 in Australia, 7,168 in Japan and 9,650 in Switzerland.

It’s fascinating to trace how the concept of celebrity has evolved since the 1960s, when Giorgio Armani first had the idea of giving away free clothing to celebrities, thereby linking clothing with aspiration and glamour.

According to the BBC, “Paris Syndrome” affects roughly a dozen Japanese tourists every year, who arrive in Paris bearing romantic expectations of the French capital, but end up hospitalized “when they discover that Parisians can be rude, or the city does not meet their expectations,” adding, “The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown.”

(Drug abuse, breakdowns and suicide are common in an industry dedicated to coming up with new, innovative ways of—there’s no other way to put it—making a shirt.)

“Enclothed cognition” is a psychological phenomenon that refers to the influences our clothing has on our cognitive and decision-making processes, and the ways we unconsciously adapt our behavior to the people and symbols around us. Do our voices get higher when we’re talking to a baby? Do they slow down when we address an elderly person? Do they deepen in the presence of our parents, or get higher around our pets?

Enclothed cognition is a variant of a field of scientific study known as embodied cognition, that believes that “humans think not only with their brains but with their bodies,3” and that in turn, our bodies themselves can suggest various abstract concepts in our brains that affect our behavior.”

On my visits to the United Kingdom, Germany and Scandinavia, I’m always struck by the sheer number of billboards advertising suntan creams and oils intended to darken natives’ complexions. But Indonesia, India, Thailand and Brazil offer almost the same number of billboards marketing creams that promise to whiten complexions. Everyone aspires to be something just a bit different than they actually are.

The happiness movement gained strength throughout the nineteenth century, as jobs moved outside of the home and, according to Harvard Business Review, “Wives and mothers were urged to maintain a cheerful atmosphere in order to reward their hardworking husbands and produce successful children.”2 Happiness has evolved today into a singularly Western, and especially American, phenomenon—even a mandate. After all, it was an American sound engineer who created the television laugh track and an American company, McDonald’s, that came out with the Happy Meal.

Ironically, our insistence on being happy all the time almost guarantees unhappiness, if only by creating the fear that you’re not measuring up to other people’s levels of contentment, wealth or well-being.

Embedded in this question was a problem I’d come up against before when working in China: an overemphasis on rational thinking and a disregard for the emotional ingredients that go into brand building.

Every successful brand stands for something more than itself, and that thing is emotional. A great brand promises hope, the contagion of coolness, or desirability, or love, or romance, or acceptance, or luxury, or youth, or sophistication, or high-quality technology.

China is a proud country. Chinese residents needed to show the world who they were, and few things shore up a person’s identity more eloquently than the car he drives.

Later, when I interviewed them outside the car, they unconsciously repeated this same behavior. To me, the scratching was an old childhood tic, an absent, unstudied gesture the men used to comfort and reassure themselves in a time of stress. The men knew they were doing something wrong. They were in a car that wasn’t theirs. They were revealing their childhood dreams. They wanted to make sure no one else noticed. In China, I would later learn, almost every other bodily gesture or expression has been tamed, trained and controlled out of existence, except, perhaps, for this one. I took note of it, and then it was time to venture inside Chinese apartment buildings.

When you do the work I do, you quickly learn that the more “personal” an item is, the more it reveals the truth about someone. Among the most personal things we own and use are those we put inside our bodies, or place inside our mouths, or that our bodies absorb—food, drinks, pills, toothbrushes and even the weather. On the basis of this equation, a banana is more “personal” than, say, a pair of shoes, in the same way a frozen TV dinner is more personal than a coat, a hat or a pair of gloves. In this case, the most critical clue about Chinese behavior—and how the Chinese assessed the quality of a product, or service—began with the sight of a lone toothbrush.

These national festivals, it seemed, were the only times the Chinese slowed down. Other than that it was all speed, all the time.

Velocity, it turned out, was one of the keys to understanding China. Speed represented an imbalance, an exaggeration. To me this implied several things, chief among them that the opportunities for transformation in China were rare, almost nonexistent.

Have you noticed how businesspeople sometimes carry around a backpack? It’s a sign of their Twin Self rejecting the typical props of the business world, and clinging to what it felt like to be young.

It’s as if the insides of our homes, and even our cars and handbags, all feature a small variation on public image—a piano, a guitar, a vintage tattered American flag—in order to provoke an emotional response in others, and signal that their owners are more than what they do for a living, more than who or what they appear. I call this phenomenon “Breaking the Frame.”

I also observed that when I was wearing my earphones, my food seemed to taste better than it did when I removed those same earphones. I played around with my headset by adjusting the volume, switching off the noise-reduction feature, but it made little difference. Without a doubt my food—and even the soda I was drinking—did taste better when I was wearing my earphones.

The Twin Self has two elements, both of which are linked to desire: what we had once, but lost, and what we once dreamed about having but never possessed.

The best insights always begin with ourselves.

It was a moment when I realized the degree to which brands fill in the missing holes of our identities, whether we acknowledge it or not.

The brands we like, and buy, and surround ourselves with—and by now you know I define a “brand” as anything from the music on our playlists to our shoes, to our sheets, to our toothpaste, to the artwork hanging on our walls—have the profoundest possible things to say about who we are.

“Brands are not treating us as individuals . . . Brands are still relying on archaic—and quite frankly, flawed—segmentation processes that market to demographics. But they don’t market to me.”

“Many of [our passwords] are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich backstories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar—these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives.”

Research might reveal that a 16-year-old girl who listens to “intense” music might find it a poor fit with her teenaged identity, and a 45-year-old Englishman who listens to John Coltrane and Chopin might tell you he pines for the intensity of his teenaged years and, in fact, wears a black rubber band around his wrist as a badge of rebellion. But you would never know this until you sat across from these people in their living rooms or bedrooms.

As accurate, then, as big data can be while connecting millions of data points to generate correlations, big data is often compromised whenever humans act like, well, humans. As big data continues helping us cut corners and automate our lives, humans in turn will evolve simultaneously to address and pivot around the changes technology creates. Big data and small data are partners in a dance, a shared quest for balance.

In every case, something was missing from people’s lives: a subconscious desire. By identifying an unmet desire, you are that much closer to uncovering a gap that can be fulfilled with a new product, a new brand or a new business. Remember that every culture in the world is out of balance, or in some way exaggerated—and in that exaggeration lies desire.

The 7Cs in my Framework stand for Collecting, Clues, Connecting, Causation, Correlation, Compensation and Concept.

Collecting, or, How are your observations translated inside a home?

Most of us are blinded by the familiar. We surround ourselves with people who are like us, who believe the same things we do. Our Facebook newsfeeds are no different, reflecting our interests, beliefs, concerns and biases.

Here, I regularly call upon a model to divide the assorted “selves” that make up the average consumer. First is the idealized self we project onto the world, the one focused around how we’d like others to see us (which, I might add, is often very different from who we actually are).

That said, the places where our idealized selves conflict with our actual selves tend to be private: our refrigerators, kitchen cabinets, wardrobes and—in the case of men—garages and online folders.

On the surface, most Danish homes are “perfect” in appearance. Get closer, and you will realize that room after room is, in fact, staged, and the country’s stress levels are among the highest in the world.

Determine how people want to be perceived by the rest of the world by asking them to show you their favorite piece of clothing. Determine the age of their Twin Self by paying close attention to the musical playlists on their smartphones, computers or streaming music services. Do they subscribe to any iTunes television shows or movies? If applicable, what films and TV shows are in their Netflix queues?