9 -3 1 4 -0 8 6

JANUARY 6, 2014

JILL AVERY

MICHAEL NORTON

Learning from Extreme Consumers

Overview
You are about to participate in a consumer behavior exercise called Learning from Extreme
Consumers. This note describes the activities that you will complete.

This exercise is designed to equip you with a unique set of consumer research tools that you can
utilize to spur radical innovation. Traditional market research techniques --- such as focus groups and
surveys --- often yield evolutionary ideas for new products and services, rather than truly
revolutionary innovation concepts. These traditional methodologies largely focus on understanding
the average experiences of average consumers. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, a leading innovation and
design firm, warns that the ‘‘tools of conventional market research can be useful in pointing towards
incremental improvements, but they will never lead to those rule-breaking, game-changing,
paradigm-shifting breakthroughs that leave us scratching our heads and wondering why nobody
1
ever thought of them before.’’

The goal of this exercise is to encourage you to study extreme consumers and to use the insights
you glean to brainstorm and prototype extreme, innovative ideas. Extreme consumers include those
who fall in both tails of a normal distribution of customers --- those with needs, behaviors, attitudes,
and emotions atypical of the average consumer. They include:

 People who are experts in your product category, and those who have never used (or
heard of) it.
 People who suffer from constraints that inhibit their use of your product, and those who
use your product in creatively brilliant ways that you never imagined.
 Rabid fans that are obsessed with your brand or product (‘‘lovers’’), and those who trash-
talk it every chance they get (‘‘haters’’).
 People who reject using your product (whether as a matter of principle or out of
necessity), and those who overindulge.

This exercise will immerse you in the worlds of extreme consumers by utilizing creative market
research techniques to uncover unusual and unique patterns of consumer behavior. The exercise
requires you to use ethnographic techniques designed to encourage you to think more deeply about
the motivations and behaviors driving consumer behavior purchase in a given product or service
category.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
HBS Professors Jill Avery and Michael Norton prepared this note as the basis for class discussion.

Copyright © 2014 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545-7685,
write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu/educators. This publication may not be digitized,
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 314-086 Learning from Extreme Consumers

What’s Wrong with Traditional Market Research Methods?

Automotive pioneer Henry Ford once proclaimed: ‘‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they
would have said ‘a faster horse.’‘‘ Ron Johnson, creator of the Apple Genius Bars, noted: ‘‘You can’t
follow the customer. You’ve got to lead your customers------anticipate their needs and meet those
2
needs, even before they know what they want.’’ Steve Jobs of Apple also eschewed traditional
market research methods, claiming: ‘‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of
times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”3 Or, as the innovative chef
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Ferran Adrià put it: ‘‘Creativity comes first. Then comes the customer.’’

There are three key limitations to traditional market research methods; each can create gaps in
understanding consumers:

1.) The Knowing That/Knowing Why Gap: Traditional market research is best used to provide data on
customers’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. It is less suitable for providing insight into the reasons
why those beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors have evolved.

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman points to a critical knowledge gap that is
created by traditional research methods: the difference between knowing that and knowing why.
Traditional market research excels at generating facts and statistics about consumers’ past and
current beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors --- such as how frequently consumers purchase or what
product features they rate highly. This type of information is often less valuable to managers than
information about the reasons why a certain behavior is exhibited (i.e., why people are not purchasing
more frequently) or why a certain attitude exists (i.e., why a certain feature is so attractive). As
Zaltman explains, ‘‘Knowing that customers prefer a container that has a round shape rather than a
square shape is important. Knowing why they prefer this shape is even more important, because it
5
may suggest a desirable configuration that is neither round nor square.’’

Many innovation experts advocate for the use of human-centric, empathic research methods, such
as ethnography, to help close this knowing that/knowing why gap. Ethnography --- the close
observational study of people through immersion in their day-to-day lives --- can inform a deeper
understanding of the ‘‘why’s’’ of consumer behavior.

2.) The Cognitive Access Gap: Consumers’ ability to describe what they want or why they buy is
limited by their imaginations and by lack of cognitive access to the motivations driving their purchases.

According to Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon, ‘‘the problem with asking
consumers what they want is that not only will they ask for things they’re not getting, but their
6
requests will usually be driven by what they see being offered by the competition.’’ Most people are
limited in their imaginations: the new products they envision borrow heavily from those already in
the marketplace. Consumers anchor too heavily on what is to be able to imagine what could be.

Worse still, the answers that consumers provide in focus groups and/or surveys about why they
buy often bear little resemblance to the actual motivations behind their purchases. Consumer
behavior is at least partly driven by unconscious motivations to which people have little conscious
access. As a result, some of what consumers reveal in market research consists merely of stories
consumers have concocted to make sense of their own behavior: people are unlikely ever to believe
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(or admit) that they purchased a car due to the attractive supermodel in the advertisement.

To access these unconscious motivations, Zaltman advocates for market research methods that
borrow from the fields of cognitive psychology, sociology, and anthropology to uncover ‘‘what
8
people don’t know they know.’’ The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), for example,

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 Learning from Extreme Consumers 314-086

elicits and analyzes the visual and text metaphors consumers use when talking about products and
brands, in the belief that these metaphors offer a glimpse into the unconscious. To uncover the
metaphors, ZMET researchers ask consumers to use photographs that reflect their thoughts and
feelings about products or brands. Similarly, brand consultant Clotaire Rapaille, uses a three-step
discovery process that involves putting consumers into a meditative state and eliciting their earliest
memories and stories about products, in the belief that this process taps their unconscious
motivations.

3.) The Inductive/Deductive/Abductive Thinking Gap: Most traditional market research techniques
rely on inductive or deductive logic, focusing on drawing inferences from common patterns observed in
data. Techniques that leverage abductive logic focus on drawing inferences from the exploration of
irregular or surprising data.

Closing the ‘‘knowing that/knowing why’’ gap is difficult using traditional market research
methods because these methods tend to rely on inductive and deductive logic for their conclusions.
Inductive logic involves inferring a general rule from a set of concrete, but limited observations: e.g.,
we observe that all of the consumers shopping in Walmart today are female, so we induce that all
Walmart shoppers must be women. Deductive logic starts with the assertion of a general rule and
then applies that rule to a specific situation, allowing us to deduce its consequence in a particular
context: e.g., consumers are more price sensitive during a recessionary period, so we deduce that the
luxury consumer segment must be more price-sensitive as well.

Philosopher Charles Sander Peirce believed that both inductive and deductive logic constrain new
ideas because both are based on drawing inferences from common patterns observed in data. He
advocated for the use of abductive logic: observing curious or surprising data that fails to accord with
preconceived patterns, norms, rules, or laws. Professor Roger Martin of the University of Toronto
notes that the inductive/deductive logic bias inherent in most market research techniques can lead
managers to confirm their pre-existing beliefs about consumers rather than explore new hypotheses.
The solution, according to Martin, lies in using techniques that rely on abductive logic, such as those
used by design professionals: ‘‘Designers live in Peirce’s world of abduction; they actively look for
9
new data points, challenge accepted explanations, and infer possible new worlds.’’ An abductive
process starts with a search for data --- and consumers --- that don’t fit, that diverge from convention,
that break the rules.

The Problem with Average Consumers

Most market research techniques assess the needs, wants, and desires of the typical consumer and
intentionally exclude outliers --- consumers who don’t match preconceived notions of a typical user.
But, ‘‘the problem with average consumers is that they’re just a bit, well, average,’’ according to Brian
10
Millar, Strategy Director at Sense Worldwide, an innovation strategy consultancy. IDEO’s Brown
cautions that ‘‘by concentrating solely on the bulge at the center of the bell curve…we are more likely
11
to confirm what we already know than learn something new and surprising.’’

Igor Ansoff’s ‘‘weak signal theory’’ warns that ignoring outlier behavior can be costly. Ansoff
notes that strategies often fail when managers overlook weak signals: ambiguous, atypical or
anomalous market data. This type of data, often dismissed by managers, can be critical in predicting,
warding against, and capitalizing on discontinuous or disruptive market forces.

Rather than ignoring extreme consumers, therefore, it is wise to learn from them.

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 314-086 Learning from Extreme Consumers

Going Extreme
When looking past the average consumer to the two tails of the normal distribution --- to ‘‘head for
the edges’’ as IDEO calls it --- several categories of extreme customers are evident:

The Fringe
 Who better to provide insight into toilet cleaners than someone suffering from obsessive-
compulsive disorder?
 Who better to design a more fashionable sandal than a podiatrist, a foot fetishist, and a
spiritual guide who teaches people to walk barefoot across hot coals?

These are just a few of the edgy consumers IDEO has used to generate radical innovation. Nike
looked to religious cults to uncover the secrets of generating such passionate loyalty for their brand
that it resembles religious zeal and idolatry. Sense Worldwide leverages its Sense Network, a global
online community populated by those who live on the fringe of society, such as goths, punks, geeks,
simple living advocates, and off-the-grid-ers, to uncover innovative ideas.

For example, when average consumers rejected the original formula for energy drink Red Bull
because it didn’t taste like cola, Sense Worldwide took the fledgling product concept to ravers ---
consumers who often stay up all night dancing and partying. Cola taste was a negative for these
extreme consumers, who preferred Red Bull’s medicinal taste because it made the product seem
better able to accommodate their need to go days without sleep. This key insight drove the eventual
positioning of the product --- as ‘‘giving you wings’’ --- when it became more mainstream.

Product Category Virgins

A second way to go extreme is to seek out consumers who have never used your product and who
have little to no knowledge of it. Such naïve, uninitiated consumers are often called product category
virgins. Novices often ask the simple questions that help uncover the taken-for-granted assumptions
under which we operate and which hold us back from radical innovation. Nintendo’s design team
sought out consumers who had never played a videogame; the result was the Nintendo Wii, a
gaming console that would have been panned by gamers due to its unsophisticated graphics and
simple games, but was passionately embraced by non-gamers.

Designers can simulate the experience of the uninitiated by placing themselves into an unfamiliar
product or service experience. When IDEO was working with a health care client, they sent one of
their lead designers to the emergency room with a faux injury so he could undergo the patient
experience first-hand. It was his first visit to an emergency room and his experience provided the
team with concrete observational data and his own emotional responses. Advertising agencies
working on traditionally female products have asked the men on their creative teams to experiment
with these unfamiliar products, encouraging them to wear high heels or shave their legs; the resulting
naïve observations can provide novel ideas.

Customers with Constraints

A third way to go extreme is to seek out people for whom existing products are problematic due
to constraints, disabilities or other special conditions that limit them in their usage. Considering
barriers that discourage some customers from purchase can help identify important constraints that ---
if removed or mitigated --- can open up new customer segments. Consumers in certain market
segments face economic, structural, and cultural constraints unimaginable to managers. Managers
often approach constraints as roadblocks, but constraints can aid the design process. Sohrab

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 Learning from Extreme Consumers 314-086

Vossoughi of Ziba Design, a design and innovation consultancy, noted: ‘‘Constraints are
12
opportunities. They force you to be creative. They focus your attention and clarify your thinking.’’

Some designers use empathy tools --- such as clouded glasses to simulate vision impairment and
belly suits to simulate pregnancy --- to simulate consumer constraints. When developing a car targeted
towards elderly drivers, Ford engineers donned a jumpsuit constructed to simulate some of the
physical constraints associated with aging: the suit limited their vision and hearing, reduced the
mobility of their arms and legs, and reduced the dexterity of their hands. This enabled them to design
the cockpit of the car with larger, more ergonomic knobs and buttons, larger print and eye-friendly
colors in the dashboard display, and doors that open wider --- to better appeal to older drivers.

Embrace, a non-profit organization, sought to reduce premature infant deaths in developing

countries by creating a low-cost incubator. When the team headed to the field, they noted that
mothers of premature infants carried their babies in a pouch close to their bodies, simulating the
warm environment of an incubator. This spurred a design that incorporated many aspects that
emerged from their field observations, a design that more closely resembled a sleeping bag than the
boxy design of contemporary incubators, that worked without electricity because many users were
off the grid, and that was quickly sanitized by boiling water because many users lacked sanitation
facilities. Understanding and working with these constraints allowed the team to design a less
expensive and more effective product.

Lovers, Haters, and Opt-Outers

A fourth way to go extreme is to find people who are passionately for --- or passionately against ---
your product or brand. These people can be easily found in pro- or anti-brand online communities or
in interest communities. Offline, brand fanatics can be found standing in line all night for a new
product release or attending product launches or protests devoted (or opposed) to your offerings.

Lead users or superusers, those who use your product first and often, frequently provide forward
looking insights. Indeed, lead users often modify products themselves to better meet their advanced
needs. Observation of such jury-rigged constructions can generate product ideas with appeal for the
masses.

Finally, critics are often an untapped mine of innovative ideas. Consumers who have used and
then rejected a product category can also provide valuable insight. Who are the most outspoken
rejecters? Why do they hate the brand or product? Attempting to overcome the objections of rejecters
can lead to novel ideas. The designers of Vibram’s Five Fingers running shoes developed their
innovative design after studying people who had rejected running shoes in favor of running barefoot.

Exercise Options
Your primary objective in this exercise is to study extreme users to develop a radical and
revolutionary product or service concept. First, choose a product or service category for which you
would like to generate new product or service innovations. Then, choose one of the methods outlined
below to identify and study extreme consumers to inform your idea generation process.

 Conduct an UnFocus Group: Assemble a diverse and unconventional (think eccentric,

weird, quirky) group of 6-10 consumers together for a focus group. Your goal is to
maximize the diversity of participants so that non-traditional ideas can emerge.

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 314-086 Learning from Extreme Consumers

 Shadow Outliers: Identify 5-6 extreme consumers and shadow them as they interact with
your product or service. Follow them as they shop or use the product. Tagging along
allows you to understand and observe their day-to-day routines, social interactions, and
purchasing and usage behaviors.

 Utilize Empathy Tools: Handicap yourself with empathy tools that allow you to simulate
the different experiences of different users. What constraints do some of the customers in
your target segment face in your product category? How might you simulate those
constraints in your own life to allow you to ‘‘walk in the shoes’’ of your customers? Are
there every day conveniences that you can forgo to embody their experience?

 Conduct a Netnography of Lovers or Haters: Use online ethnography, or netnography, to

analyze the conversations of consumers in online brand communities. Find fan clubs or
affinity groups like rennlist.com (Porsche) and cultofmac.com (Apple) to uncover these
extreme proponents’ views. And, look for the haters. Find sites like dellhell.net (Dell) or
walmartsucks.livejournal.com (Walmart) to view the arguments against a product or
service. What are these consumers’ values? Who are their leaders? What brings them
together or drives them apart?

 Go Extreme Yourself: Be extreme in your own consumer behavior. If you are an avid
user of your client’s product category, deprive yourself of it for a week. Or, go to the
opposite extreme and immerse yourself in the product category for a week --- overdoing it
to gain insight into the experience of superusers. To better understand fast food culture,
Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s for one year (documented in his film Super
Size Me). John Winter Smith (of the film Starbucking) visited all of the world’s Starbucks.

Exhibit 1 provides sample activities for each method used by new product innovation teams.

Finally, compare and contrast your extreme consumer research experiences with traditional
market research techniques. Use the following discussion questions to structure your thinking:

 What did you learn from studying extreme consumers? What kinds of insights did you
glean from this research that you could not uncover using traditional market research
techniques?

 In what ways are these techniques more and less effective than traditional market
research methods? How well did these techniques address the common problems
associated with traditional market research methods?

 What challenges would you face in implementing the ideas that came from using these
techniques in designing new products and services? How might you overcome them?

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 314-086 -7-

Exhibit 1 Sample Extreme Consumer Exercise Activities

Exercise Option Implementation Tips Sample Activity

Conduct an UnFocus Group Adhere to IDEO’s brainstorming guidelines to encourage A team designing a health supplement gathered
rich, creative and divergent contributions from all together a heterogeneous group including a doctor, an
participants: encourage wild ideas, defer judgment to herbalist, an acupuncturist, and a member of a
avoid interrupting the flow of ideas, build on the ideas of religious group that rejects modern medicine in favor
others, hold one conversation at a time, go for quantity. of prayer.

Encourage play: Have a box filled with curiosities to A team designing an energy drink gathered together
inspire participants. people who need to stay alert and people who need
energy: an investment banker, a weight lifter, an air
Go visual: encourage participants to sketch their ideas in force pilot, and a personal trainer.
pictures or bring in photos that represent their thoughts
and feelings about the product category or brand.

Shadow Outliers Observe how the consumption activity is embedded in the A team designing a car sharing service shadowed
everyday lives and activities of your participants. hitch hikers.

Note in detail all tasks, actions, objects, participants, and A team designing a new car targeted to new drivers
interactions involved in the process. sat in the back seat during driver’s education classes.

Ask participants to describe their thoughts aloud during A team designing a skin care product observed the
their activities. morning routine of both heavy users (6+ skin care
products used per day) and non-users (no skin care

OPS 5003.. at Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Dec 2024 to Jun 2025.
products ever used).

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 314-086 -8-

Utilize Empathy Tools Keep a diary of the physical, social, and emotional A team designing an ecommerce website accessed
experiences you have while using your empathy tools. websites using a dial-up modem to simulate the
slower Internet connection speeds experienced by
Write down all of the constraints, roadblocks, and consumers in an emerging market.
problems you encounter --- and use these to prompt
brainstorming possible solutions. A team designing a women’s razor put on vision
reducing glasses and doused their hands in olive oil
while shaving to simulate the foggy, slippery
environment of a morning shower.

Conduct a Netnography of Sample a diversity of online communities (3-6), sample A team designing a fast food restaurant studied online
Lovers or Haters enough conversations (100+) and include the voices of a McDonald’s fan clubs and brand communities.
diverse group of posters (50+) within each community.
A team designing a product designed to help users
Document the traditions and rituals in which consumers quit smoking studied online anti-smoking
engage to uncover the deeper meaning that the product communities.
has for them.

Note the specific language and stories that consumers use

to express their views --- both positive and negative.

Go Extreme Yourself Take notes on the effects of your extreme usage on your A team working on mobile telecommunications gave
physical and emotional state. up their cell phones for one week.

Note the ways in which being extreme changed your A team working on baby food ate nothing but baby
attitudes and feelings towards the product or service --- for food for one week.

OPS 5003.. at Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Dec 2024 to Jun 2025.
better and for worse.
A team working on rice cookers made all of their
meals in a rice cooker for one week.

Source: Casewriters.

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 Learning from Extreme Consumers 314-086

Endnotes

1
Brown, Tim (2009) Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,
New York, HarperCollins Publishers, p. 40.
2
Morse, Gardiner (2012) ‘‘Retailing Isn’t Broken. Stores Are,’’ Harvard Business Review, December 2011, p. .
3
Reinhardt, Andy (1998) ‘‘Steve Jobs on Apple’s Resurgence: ‘Not a One-Man Show,’’’ Business Week Online,
May 12, 1998, http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may1998/nf80512d.htm, downloaded 10/22/13.
4 Norton, Michael I., Julian Villanueva, and Luc Wathieu (2009). elBulli: The Taste of Innovation. Harvard

Business School Case 509-015.

5 Zaltman, Gerald (2003) How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market, Boston, MA,

Harvard Business School Press, p. 15.

6
Moon, Youngme (2010) Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, New York, Crown Business, p. 34.
7
Nisbett, Richard E. and Timothy D. Wilson (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on
mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.
8
Zaltman, Gerald (2003) How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market, Boston, MA,
Harvard Business School Press, p. 75.
9
Martin, Roger (2009) The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, Boston,
MA, Harvard Business Press, p. 65.
10
Millar, Brian (2012) ‘‘Need Extreme Ideas? Talk to Extreme Consumers,’’ Wired Magazine, April 30, 2012,
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-04/30/extreme-consumers, downloaded 10/22/13.
11
Brown, Tim (2009) Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,
New York, HarperCollins Publishers, p. 44.
12
Martin, Roger (2009) The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, Boston,
MA, Harvard Business Press, p. 127.

This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ganesh C B , Prof. Shivan Sanjay Patel, Prof. Rahul R, Prof. Mukta Srivastava & Prof. Ashish Singh Bhandari's Business Research Methods-
OPS 5003.. at Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Dec 2024 to Jun 2025.