From supply chain bottlenecks to inflationary pressures, businesses across industries continue to grapple with a world defined by relentless change. In this unstable market landscape, business-as-usual approaches are nowhere near sufficient for survival or long-term success.

Covid-19 can’t cancel Thanksgiving 2020, but it sure can shrink it.

Banning large gatherings and the fear of infecting grandma have shrunk the Thanksgiving holiday to an almost unrecognizable form.

In a recent letter to Amazon shareholders, Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said consumer feedback didn’t lead to the development of Amazon’s popular Echo device.

“No customer was asking for Echo,” Bezos wrote. “This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said ‘Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?’ I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said ‘No, thank you.’”

You can tell a lot by a company’s logo. 

Especially in hindsight.

When we acquired the market research publisher Packaged Facts 20 years ago the logo was a paperclip. 

Which was fitting, as was its name, since the company started out as a packager of facts, probably delivered in a stack of paper bound by a clip?

But the evolution of how market research is produced and the changing customer expectations is more dramatic than going from a paperclip to a paperless click.

Twenty years after the launch of MarketResearch.com, questions about the changing concept of content, the new face of the customers and the overall business landscape, abound.

There is a famous New Yorker cartoon with one dog sitting in front of a desk-top computer telling another dog: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

It appeared in 1993.

And now 24 years later the problem of internet identity has moved from a punch line to the front lines of business, news, politics and commerce.

Five days after the close of a month, I sit at my desk and go through our P/L (profit and loss) statement looking for signs, messages, trends, clarity.

I suspect many in the political world are doing the same.

I print out all the pages that show what we call the “monthly trend” so I can see how we’ve done in previous months, with a final column comparison to the budget.

I take out a wooden ruler from my drawer, and I follow each line asking myself questions about what I expected. Does it jive with what I was told? Does it go along with the narrative I heard over the previous 30 days?

If the election were my P/L, here is what I would consider:

The two most famous stories about market research are used as arguments against it.

In the first story, Henry Ford famously said that no bit of research or consumer testing would have led him to car production. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

That may have been true, but Henry Ford wasn’t in the buggy business or even the transportation business. He was a machinist and worked on his family farm. His goal was not to build the first car or enhance transportation; it was to improve car production. Ford neither invented the car nor the assembly line; instead, he improved them so middle America could afford automobiles. He was all about improving efficiency because he knew, from market research, that most Americans didn’t have cars because they were too expensive. His job was to build a car cheap enough for America to buy, not build a faster buggy.

In the first episode of the hit series Mad Men, Don Draper explains to the client, Lucky Strike cigarettes, that advertising is "based on one thing: happiness. And, do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing is okay. You are okay."

But, how do you measure your customers' happiness? Predict it? Create products that elicit it? Do customers even know what they want?

Every business needs to evolve. Otherwise, you'll find yourself running the best buggy whip business at the turn of the century. Growing revenue is not the only benchmark of a healthy business. A business can be healthy and heading down the right path until, well, it isn't. Phrases like innovator's dilemma, innovator's solution and accelerated disruption have hit the lexicon.

Borders Books made $101 million less than three years before losing $157 million. Blackberry (enough said), Sears, JC Penney, and even more recent high fliers like Zynga have simply misread the market and found themselves on a downward trajectory after experiencing substantial success previously.

So, how do you grow? What new products will attract the customers I want? What else can I sell to my current customers? Where are my new customers? New markets?  By definition, I don’t know anything about them, how do I learn?