More on research

"P&G’s focus on consumers gives new lease of life to the company" .. that;'s what Fortune says about the new consumer consumer centric attitude of the giant. I'm saying consumer twice because naturally they were consumer cnetric before so now they must be twice that ...
OTOH, Apple overtly disses any market research stating that they make products they would love and that seems to work.
But they both make money.
Two great companies with two very different approaches to creating meaning and the questions is how can they both be right. One says people have no idea what they want and the other says that only by listening to people you can understand what they want.
Truth lies in the middle. I think that people truly don’t know what they want but their actions speak louder than words and by observing them, you get more information than you would talking to them. Basically when asked to rationalize what they want they put to work a host of notions they are familiar with. But innovation does not work with notions everyone knows. What it does is it takes things we do not have a notion for yet and makes them part of communication. If people could tell you what they wanted then it would already exist. The trick is to see what they do and find a name and a solution for it. Maybe that is the real definition of what we mean when we say insight.