Why All the Polls in the World Are Wrong
We are about to get down to the wire in this election season and polls are going to come in almost daily. There will be bar charts and pie charts and histograms and infographics. Commentators will share these visual works of art and draw pointed, definitive, passionate conclusions about us, and you and me and our country, our county, our zip code. In America in 2020, we have the data science DOWN and we can DEFINITELY make an infographic.
The thing is, many politicians, brands and marketers often confuse surveys and polls with actually listening to constituents and customers and understanding them. In fact, I believe that data can actually CONFUSE the understanding of a particular concept because we uncouple data from human language and human emotion.
Human Language and Human Emotion are key to understanding what people are thinking.
That means that you can have all the data in the world, and yet never truly understand the concept of what a group of people really think. With just raw data, uncoupled from the emotion behind it and the natural language of human communication, you’re falling into a giant translation gap. From complex human existence, to over simplified data, the essence of thought is lost. So, how can we solve for this? We have to place an equal value to LISTENING as we do to data collection. This rarely happens and it’s the pivot we need to really understand people, to do better work, to actually generate effective change.
LISTENING versus data collection
The key difference between listening and collecting data is the preservation of natural language and human emotion. To be truly effective, your research must involve conversation and must be as rigorous as your data collection. That means focus groups or listening sessions.it means combing social media posts. It means reading customer service chats and listening to customer calls — Anything you can do to get close to the natural language of your target audience. As I mentioned in my last post, people will actually tell you what they want you to be, how they want you to meet their needs, if your organization is built to listen. And, if you are really listening, your audience will give you the actual language to be successful. Data can never, ever do that.
Collect Data AND Collect Conversations
I’d like this to be the real takeaway whether you are a company or a campaign: data is less than 49% of the whole picture, every day, all day. If your research process doesn’t also generate natural language, human emotion and conversations you don’t understand your audience.
And, the two biggest wins of making conversation part of your practice are :
It’s dynamic and three-dimensional in a way that data never can be. Because if you don’t understand what someone just said, you can drill deeper, understand more, ask better questions and get smarter
The act of listening and being heard also transforms your audience.
No one knows how hard you work behind-the-scenes evaluating my data, the hundreds of hours you spend crunching my analytics, and, in fact, surveys are pretty annoying. But, you ask me how I feel, what I need and you really listen to me… I’ll probably think you’re working hard to understand me.
Lexicon Strategies Co-founder Brian Tolleson was previously CEO of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, founder of renowned advertainment studio BARK BARK, and former Marketing and Creative executive at Viacom.
Brian has spent his career working at the intersection of human rights, media and social justice while managing billions in partnership marketing initiatives, multi-platform branding and content strategy for distributors like Sony, NBC Universal, and Google, as well as marketers such as P&G, Unilever, Clorox, Chase, Target, Microsoft, Starbucks, Mercedes Benz, Chevron and General Motors.