Are You Following the Money or Following the Feelings?

Big companies have big hearts.

They’re deeply and hopelessly in love with their own
marketing, their own products, their own brand values, their own policies,
their own language, their own ideas and their own technology.

Good.

What’s important about this infatuation is, it creates an
interesting opportunity for us, the outsiders, the objective observers, the
arbiters of unconventional wisdom, to deliver a heroic dose of customer centric
perspective by finding something the client would never think look for.

Personally, I gain the most insight by reading amateur
online reviews, browsing sarcastic social media hashtags, searching for video
parodies, looking at patterns in customer photo streams, poking around for
controversy attached to the industry and googling the client’s brand with
emotional words attached to the search phrase.

By tapping into these ordinary conversations and normal discourses people
are having in their daily world, we see things the client can’t.

Because we don’t follow the money, we follow the feelings.

Feelings aren’t facts, but they do leave fingerprints. And when
we listen loudly enough, we tend to pick up on the little things that can change
everything.

Find the path that’s already been laid out for you and start
walking.