Start With Why

arm to make a decision that doesn’t sit well in our gut. We trust our gut to help us decide whom to vote for or which shampoo to buy. Because our biology complicates our ability to verbalize the real reasons why we make the decisions we do, we rationalize based on more tangible factors, like the design or the service or the brand. This is the basis for the false assumption that price or features matter more than they do. Those things matter, they provide us the tangible things we can point to to rationalize our decision-making, but they don’t set the course and they don’t inspire behavior.

It’s What You Can’t See That Matters
    “Gets your whites whiter and your brights brighter,” said the TV commercial for the newest laundry detergent. This was the value proposition for so many years in the laundry detergent business. A perfectly legitimate claim. That’s what the market research revealed customers wanted. The data was true, but the truth of what people wanted was different.
    The makers of laundry detergent asked consumers WHAT they wanted from detergent, and consumers said whiter whites and brighter brights. Not such a remarkable finding, if you think about it, that people doing laundry wanted their detergent to help get their clothes not just clean, but very clean. So brands attempted to differentiate HOW they got your whites whiter and brights brighter by trying to convince consumers that one additive was more effective than another. Protein, said one brand. Color enhancers, said another. No one asked customers WHY they wanted their clothes clean. That little nugget wasn’t revealed until many years later when a group of anthropologists hired by one of the packaged-goods companies revealed that all those additives weren’t in fact driving behavior. They observed that when people took their washing out of the dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white it was or compared it to newer items to see how bright it was. The first thing people did when they pulled their laundry out of the dryer was to smell it. This was an amazing discovery. Feeling clean was more important to people than being clean. There was a presumption that all detergents get your clothes clean. That’s what detergent is supposed to do. But having their clothes smell fresh and clean mattered much more than the nuanced differences between which detergent actually made clothes measurably cleaner.
    That a false assumption swayed an entire industry to follow the wrong direction is not unique to detergents. Cell phone companies believed people wanted more options and buttons until Apple introduced its iPhone with fewer options and only one button. The German automakers believed their engineering alone mattered to American car buyers. They were stunned and perplexed when they learned that great engineering wasn’t enough. One by one, the German luxury car makers begrudgingly added cup holders to their fine automobiles. It was a feature that mattered a great deal to commuter-minded Americans, but was rarely mentioned in any research about what factors influenced purchase decisions. I am not, for a moment, proposing that cup holders make people loyal to BMWs. All I am proposing is that even for rationally minded car buyers, there is more to decision-making than meets the eye. Literally.
    The power of the limbic brain is astounding. It not only controls our gut decisions, but it can influence us to do things that seem illogical or irrational. Leaving the safety of home to explore faraway places. Crossing oceans to see what’s on the other side. Leaving a stable job to start a business out of your basement with no money in the bank. Many of us look at these decisions and say, “That’s stupid, you’re crazy. You could lose everything. You could get yourself killed. What are you thinking?” It is not logic or facts but our hopes and dreams, our hearts and our guts, that drive us to try new things.
    If we were all rational, there would be no small businesses, there would be no exploration, there would be very little innovation and there would be no great leaders to inspire all those things. It is the undying belief in something bigger and better that drives that kind of behavior. But it can also control behavior born out of other emotions, like hate or fear. Why else would someone plot to hurt someone they had never met?
    The amount of market research that reveals that people want to do business with the company that offers