Your Customers Are Lying to You

The scene: Executive Boardroom. McDonald’s corporate, 1991.

The executive team has been presented with the most exhaustive consumer research in the history of fast food. Hundreds of focus groups. Tens of thousands of surveys. The message from American consumers is clear, consistent, and frankly a little overwhelming:

We want healthy options.

We are tired of greasy burgers. We care about cholesterol. We watched our parents have heart attacks and we do not want to follow them. We are exercising. (This is in the Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons era if you want a good visual.) We are reading nutrition labels! And not just because we’re bored while we’re eating cereal. Give us a healthy option and we will reward you.

McDonald’s, to their credit, listened. They spent years and tens of millions of dollars developing the McLean Deluxe: a 91% fat-free burger that used carrageenan and water to stay juicy without the grease. They tested it, refined it, and got it tasting genuinely good. (At least, according to consumers. I was a quarter-pounder with cheese guy at the time, so I wouldn’t know.) They launched it nationally with the full force of the award-winning McDonald’s marketing machine.

…You know what happened next, right?

It was such a catastrophic failure that it’s used as an illustration here, over 30 years later.

The same customers who had told them, in every survey, that they wanted healthier food walked right past the McLean Deluxe and ordered a Big Mac with extra cheese. By 1996, McDonald’s quietly took it off the menu. (The same thing happened years later with the McSalad Shakers…remember those? Sometimes we need to learn a lesson more than once.)

So…what happened?

The customers told the truth. …In a manner of speaking.

They genuinely wanted to be the kind of person who would walk into a McDonald’s and order a 91% fat-free burger. But they wouldn’t be caught dead actually eating one. They wanted to want it. There is a meaningful difference between those two things, and that difference is the most useful thing I know about the people who pay you.

Here’s the part that took me years to get right, and I got it wrong by being annoyed instead of curious. The customers didn’t lie per se. They told McDonald’s the exact truth: “I want to be the kind of person who orders the fat-free burger.” That is a true sentence…but it isn’t a lunch order. People will tell you, with their whole heart, who they wish they were. Then they’ll show you who they are when the tray slides out. Both of those people are real. Both are sitting in your customer data right now. Only one of them ever buys anything, and learning to tell them apart is a critical first step.

So no, your customer is not lying to you. Your customer is something far more interesting than a liar. She’s a human being, which means she can’t fully explain her own purchases, won’t switch to the better thing even when the math is begging her to, and is usually buying something other than the thing on your invoice. (You do all of this too. So do I. We’ll get to my own greatest hits.)

Meet the Irrational Buyer.

He is the most fascinating person in your company’s orbit, and I’d bet a good pour of something that you’ve never properly been introduced.

* * *

Let me tell you about a family in Williamson County, Tennessee, aka “WillCo”. The family in question is doing what families do. They have two kids in elementary school, a dog or three, and a convoluted color-coded schedule of activities (Often which requires the two drivers to defy the laws of physics and be in three places at once). They need to replace their now too-small sedan. As most families would, they sit down at the kitchen table and make a list of what they need in their next vehicle.

Space. Lots of it. The kids need room. The dog needs room. The grocery hauls need room and CostCo does not have small items. Sliding doors…please, can we have sliding doors? (The sedan has standard doors that little Brayden delights to swing open into other cars in every parking lot they have ever visited.) Safety…above all, safety. Good fuel economy. Reasonable price.

They have just described, with surgical precision, a minivan.

Minivans dominate every single metric on their list. They have more space than any SUV at the same price point. They have sliding doors. They have the best safety ratings in their class. They get better fuel economy than any equivalent SUV. They are, by every objective measure, the correct vehicle for this family. So what does our exemplary WillCo family do?

They buy a Tahoe.

Or a Suburban. Or a Pathfinder. Or a Yukon. Or, often in our county, a Land Rover with a third row the children are forbidden from sitting in because it’s leather. I live in WillCo. I see this every day. There is no place in America more committed to the SUV than this one. We could probably solve our homeless problem with the unused third-row space alone.

Sometimes, and WillCo seemingly specializes in this, they buy a Ford F-150 with an extended four-door cab and a six-foot bed that is lifted to the perfect height for their headlights to blind literally everyone else on the road, because nothing says “I need to haul a soccer practice carpool” like a vehicle designed to tow a double-wide trailer.

Why?

Because they do not want to look like a minivan family.

That really is it. They want everything a minivan would give them. They just do not want to be the kind of person whose car is a minivan. The functional benefits — every single one of them on their list — get traded away for a single, unstated, never-articulated reason: identity.

If you had run a focus group with this family in March, before they bought, they would have told you they wanted a minivan. They genuinely did want a minivan. They wanted to be the kind of practical, focused, family-first parents who would assess the situation rationally and buy the correct vehicle. They wanted to want it.

They just did not actually want it.

Researchers call this stated preference versus revealed preference. People will tell you what they wish were true, and then they will reveal what is actually true the moment a credit card comes out of a wallet. Both versions of them are real. Only one of them is buying anything.

Your customer does this. Every single day.

When they tell you they want better customer support, they want it. When they tell you they value quality over price, they value it. When they tell you they want a vendor who is a “true strategic partner” instead of a transactional supplier, they want one.

They also, almost always, choose the cheapest option that does the basic job, treat support as an afterthought until something breaks, and quietly resent the vendor who tries to be a strategic partner because that vendor keeps wanting to have strategic conversations when they just want their stuff to work.

Both versions of them are real. Only one of them is buying anything from you.

This plagues every person in your org who gathers feedback from customers. Marketers who run surveys. Product managers who do user interviews. Sales teams who are working opportunities. Customer service…from tail to snout, every single one of them is being lied to by your customers without the liar even knowing they’re doing it.

The McLean Deluxe is sitting in your customer data right now. You just have not identified it yet. Next week, we’ll start to talk about how to do so.