Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends

by Martin Lindstrom

Kevin Roberts of Saatchi and Saatchi argued that great brands have two advantages: (1) they evoke respect for their technological performance, durability, and effectiveness; and (2) they evoke love because, well, . . . we love them. Brands like HP and Duracell are “respect” brands and Big Data can often help make decisions about increasing respect (Given our history are customers likely to spend 20% more if we make our batteries last 15% longer?), but brands such as Disney, Cheerios, and Geek Squad are respected and loved, and Big Data is pretty incompetent at suggesting how to increase the love.

Our businesses will not improve through Big Data alone. We need to follow Martin and explore Rich Data. Deep Data. Even if it comes in the form of Small Data. Our businesses will be better for it.

I call today’s young teens and adolescents the Power Plug Generation, or Screenagers, as they’re constantly searching for the nearest wall socket. The fear of being without power is like the fear of being consigned to a barren island, marooned from friends, forced, perhaps, to face who you are without a phone in your hand.

A new business concept generally has its origins in a cultural imbalance or exaggeration—too much of something, or too little of something—which indicates that something is either missing or blocked in the society.

In an analysis of over one billion pieces of emoji data across the globe, across numerous categories, it wasn’t surprising to find that UK residents had the highest ratio of “winking” emojis, a means, perhaps, of compensating for their usual reserve.

What defines a community? The answer I’ve come up with, which draws from my experiences in countries including Lebanon, New Zealand, Germany, Colombia and Italy, is this: communities come together in the face of conflict and disagreement. When North American tourists come home from a vacation in Europe, often the first story out of their mouth has to do with an incident of antagonism they observed. Parisians, for example, understand that unless they demand a certain cut of meat, or a ripe cheese, they will probably not get what they want.

If, during a European vacation, Americans observe an altercation or an argument in a French marche or an Italian restaurant, they remember it. When other people are arguing, the crowd around them comes together as a community.

In common with Russia, American children seldom play outdoors. Russia can use the excuse of cold weather, but in the United States, the daily torrent of bad news from televisions and smartphones leads most parents to believe that murder or abduction lies at the end of their driveways. In both countries, men escape. In Russia, men disappear on fishing boats weighed down with cases of vodka. In American, men go golfing.

From what I’d observed about the larger culture, Americans were in need of an escape, or reprieve, from the sameness of their lives. A current of tedium and familiarity runs through every culture, but the uniformity of the American shopping landscape had drained away an element of unexpectedness. As Paulo Coehlo wrote once, “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal.”

Just as I’d done in Russia, in Lowes I needed to create an oasis, a destination for dreaming. If possible I would also restore a feeling of community that most Americans didn’t even realize they were missing.

BEFORE I DID ANYTHING ELSE, I first had to create within Lowes what I call a Permission Zone. This is a term I use to refer to a moment, or an environment, that allows consumers to “enter” an alternate emotional state. A Permission Zone can be literal, like a zoo, a ferry ride or a movie theater, or even a fast-food restaurant where we eat the foods we generally avoid.

A Permission Zone can be linguistic, too. If you’ve ever sat in a meeting, or had a conversation with someone you don’t know well, you probably remember the first time one of you swears.

Without even realizing it, you’ve just granted the other people in the room permission to use profanity. You can almost feel the unbuckling of formality in the room, and from that point on, everyone at the table will begin swearing.

to create a sense of storewide community. Based on my experience that people come together in the presence of disagreement, I set myself the task of igniting in-store conflict.

Lowes Chicken Kitchen was up and running. Imagine a stand-alone counter selling chickens and only chickens, manned by an employee wearing a specially tailored Chicken Hat. He’s engaged in perpetual disagreement with his rival, who stands behind a second kiosk, the SausageWorks, and is dressed as Back to the Future’s Doc Brown. With the help of Lowes management, I created scripts for both characters, and asked them to

remain in character and spend all day bickering and hollering at each other. Again, when people witness disagreement—in this case, orchestrated, cartoonish conflict—they not only feel more alive, but the “community” feeling that conflict generates ripples through every department and aisle of the store. In no time at all, huge crowds had formed around the Chicken Kitchen and the SausageWorks. At first, shoppers looked concerned. Then, when they realized it was a game, they came together as a single tribe. Today, as a result of the Mad Professor at the sausage counter “fighting” with the proprietor of the Chicken Kitchen, Lowes not only sells more chickens and sausages, it sells more of everything.

What’s more, every time a chicken comes out of the oven, Lowes’ proprietary “Chicken Dance” song plays over the store’s loudspeakers. Overseen by a stage manager, every member of Lowes staff participates in the dance and the song, creating exactly what the local community craved: a sense of belonging. No matter where they were in the store, customers stopped what they were doing and began dancing. It sounds ridiculous, and it was, but it was rid...

when we use both hands to give something to someone else, they automatically receive it with two hands. I instructed the hosts of both the Chicken Kitchen and the Sausage Works to wrap and present their wares to shoppers using just this method. By doing so, both convey to consumers that what they have just received is special, and even exceptional, and that the person giving it and the person receiving it are just as exceptional.

What I tried to do at Lowes is, in fact, just the beginning of what bricks-and-mortar stores can do to wage battle against larger Internet retailers. Why not revolutionize what the inside of a supermarket looks like? What if a supermarket could create fresh yogurt on the spot, or even fresh baby food?

Amazon, and even Walmart, can’t begin to compete against freshness delivered literally a minute or two after a shopper has placed an order.

IN 1981, A COLLECTION of elderly New England men disembarked from a van and made their way inside a former New Hampshire monastery that had been retrofitted for the experiment that was

about to take place—what its creator, Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer, called the “Counterclockwise Test.” All of them were males in their 70s and early 80s,

But once they passed through the doors, a radically different scene, and even year, greeted them....

The men had been given explicit instructions: They were not only encouraged to exchange reminiscences about this era, but as much as possible, to become the same age they were

nearly two decades earlier. They were urged to refer to events that took place in 1959 in the present tense.

This “psychological intervention,” as the New York Times called it,9 was conjured by Langer who, over the course of a brilliant academic career, believed that in order to improve their health, older

people needed a jolt, or a trigger, that would fool their own minds and bodies into healing themselves.

Five days later, both groups of men had their vital signs retested. In every case, their posture and gaits showed signs of improvement. Their eyesight and hearing were both better. Physically, both groups were mor...

As Langer told the New York Times, the men had “‘put their mind in an earlier time,’ and their bodies went along for the ride.”10

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.

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,

Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger and Apple CEO Steve Jobs once had a conversation about retail, during which Jobs told Iger that retailers should always ask themselves one question: If a store could talk, what would it say to the people entering it? Disney Stores may have a functional layout, but from an emotional perspective, Disney’s Green Script intent is to create the 30 happiest minutes in a child’s life.

No less essential to a religion—or a brand—are rituals. Whether you drink a Corona beer alongside a lime, or order a Caffè Misto at Starbucks, the rituals of a shared language, and a shared way of doing things, bond consumers together. Rituals serve as an entry ticket to an exclusive universe consumers want to join, and the more often they repeat a ritual, the more of a hardcore fan they become.

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.

We all have multiple ages inside of us.

The first is our actual physical, chronological age. Then there’s our inner age, the age we feel emotionally inside. I call this “emotional age” our Twin Self. It’s a phenomenon I make it a habit to remember whenever I’m running a board meeting. The conference room may be filled with businesspeople in their 50s and 60s, and to avoid feeling like a kid who someone managed to sneak into the corporate offices, I focus on what I take to be their approximate inner age—for most people, this age is anywhere from 18 to 26—at which point whatever fear or trepidation I might have felt disappears. Who among us, at 50 years of age, “feels” 50? Almost no one. A good rule of thumb in brand building is to communicate, always, to a consumer’s Twin Self

What determines someone’s inner age? In my experience, our inner age is directly connected to the first time we felt liberated and on our own.

If most psychologists agree that identity is a construct, then we’re all engaged in three processes simultaneously: Expressing who we are; expressing who we believe, or hope, we are; and finally, expressing who we want other people to think we are.

sound can also change our perception of product performance. (When consumers vacuum using a silent vacuum cleaner, most will tell you it’s not working. This same high degree of irrationality perhaps explains why when we vacuum the rug only to see a tiny thread on the floor, we pass the vacuum head over it stubbornly and repeatedly, even though it would be much easier to pick it up.) Human irrationality led me to ponder the following question: By altering, or even eradicating its sound, had iRobot damaged the very heart of its brand?

To re-infuse the “cuteness.” When I asked Roomba fans what other brand reminded them most of the Roomba, most told me it was BMW’s MINI Cooper, which everyone will agree

has cuteness down to a science. When you order a new MINI Cooper, among other communiqués, BMW promptly sends you updates from England, digital links about the MINI and a reflective decal. When a new MINI is aboard a container ship, bound for its destination, the company’s communications continue: The Mini is enjoying its cruise and relaxing, and can’t wait to see you! MINI owners who’ve had their cars serviced at a BMW dealership have their cars returned with a sign on its wheel saying, I Missed You.

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

Concept. Consider the following as a pocket guide to how to take one, or several, small pieces of small data—a refrigerator magnet, a porcelain frog—and very possibly transform them into a winning concept.

COLLECTING, OR, HOW ARE YOUR OBSERVATIONS TRANSLATED INSIDE A HOME?

The “collecting” step begins with establishing navigation points, on both macro and micro levels. This includes getting perspectives from cultural observers, for example, people who are new to the area, either expats or people who see the community through objective eyes. Ask them: What does the neighborhood, or city, or town, look like and feel like? Are the sidewalks deserted? Are there children playing outside? Are people friendly? Do you ever feel scared, and if so, why? Is there any sense of neighborhood pride? If you see people on the streets, do they meet your eyes or look away? Is the garbage picked up regularly? What makes a city

or town come together? What divides it? Why?

Now, seek out a hairdresser or one or several other “local observers” who can help you establish a baseline perspective, and who inhabit a more or less neutral space within a community. It doesn’t have to be a hairdresser; it could be a bartender, a mailman, or a church, community or sports club leader. Whoever it is, cultural and local observers are privy to information most people

are not. They can tell you what’s really going on. They are more or less unbiased. They can also point you to their own networks of friends and acquaintances.

The navigation points you gather from local observers will help you to frame your initial observations and create a hypothesis...