Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

by Martin Lindstrom

A country’s “brand” is an aggregate of its wars, music, sports, climate, leadership, location, tacit traditions and national character—its entire social, political and cultural history—which blur and intersect over time.

The iPhone is a source of national pride for the Chinese,

A Western-branded product guarantees that a phone, or a car, isn’t just real, but that it also works.

By contrast, the Chinese are historically skeptical about Chinese-made products, from cars to infant formula, especially premium-priced ones.

What was the point of being a successful Chinese businessman if you ended up driving a Chinese car?

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.

Thanks to our phones we are never altogether present and never completely alone.

In my experience, we listen to the television more than we actually watch it.

17

BBC News once reported that people eating to a soundtrack of loud background noise rated food as being less salty, less sweet and even crunchier than those who ate in silence.18

From Pepsi, I learned that just as a pair of earphones can persuade us that the meal we’re eating on the plane is flavorful; sound can also change our perception of product performance.

patience with a product that doesn’t come to life immediately. An American tourist traveling abroad who switches on a Bang & Olufsen television in his hotel room will likely perceive the set as broken, not realizing it takes roughly seven seconds to turn on. Apple is one company that has solved this issue smartly. When a consumer powers on an iPhone, the silvery Apple logo appears, alerting users that the phone is on. Knowing the phone works, a consumer is happy to wait an additional 30 seconds before the phone is officially ready for use. I have no doubt that Apple engineers could tinker with the insides to make the phone turn on more quickly. Instead, they’ve designed the iPhone to give users both instant gratification and a sense of anticipation, which they interpret to mean that the phone is both technologically sophisticated and high quality. China, of course, was different.

What is the fundamental appeal of books and films such as The Godfather and the Bourne and Matrix franchises? What explains the popularity of Batman, or Superman, or Spider-Man, or the X-Men films, or the success of the American television series Breaking Bad? The answer: they all feature as their protagonist a normal, everyday, even somewhat mild male who evolves into an animal or, at the very least, a powerful, menacing, occasionally cold-blooded killer who plays by his own rules. It was this aspect—the driver with a Twin Self, who is also in possession of a masterful, powerful alter ego—that I recommended we incorporate into the overall design of our “Made in China” car.

That humans are prone to seeing the world in different ways—while still being more similar than we ever imagine—is what this book is about.

I’ve somehow managed to come up with brands or innovations not despite of my outsider’s status, but because of it.

The best insights always begin with ourselves.

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.

If companies want to understand consumers, big data offers a valuable, but incomplete, solution. I would argue that our contemporary preoccupation with digital data endangers high-quality insights and observations—and thus products and product solutions—and that for all the valuable insights big data provides, the Web remains a curated, idealized version of who we really are.

Climate, Rulership, Religion and Tradition.

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.

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

The first step in the 7C process, then, is to do everything you can to remove the filter that keeps you from seeing what is really going on.

Finally, I ask people to answer two questions: What is most important in your life? and What worries you the most?